‘Pushed to the wall, we had no other choice’

Karachi
Muttahida Qaumi Movement lawmakers, after submitting their resignations from their assembly seats, told reporters on Wednesday that they had taken the step in protest against the political victimisation of the party under the garb of the crackdown against criminals.
Khawaja Izhar-ul-Hasan, the leader of the opposition in the Sindh Assembly, said now the MQM would hold assembly sessions in the union councils of each district instead of the provincial legislature and directly address the people’s issues.
The MQM lawmakers kept shouting slogans in support of their party chief Altaf Hussain after submitting their resignations to speaker Agha Siraj Durrani until they reached the reporters to talk to them.
Hasan said the MQM, which was Sindh’s second largest and the country’s third largest political party, had reduced the Pakistan People’s Party to nothing in the provincial “so-called” democratic assembly after submitting the resignations.
“We have converted the PPP into a minority, and now they can run the assembly like pharaohs who continue oppressing the downtrodden people,” said Hasan.
He added that 51 elected representatives of the 25 million citizens of Karachi and 10 million residents of Mirpurkhas and Hyderabad had turned the provincial assembly into a “rubberstamp parliament”.
“Now the ball is in the people’s court. Some of our parliamentarians had joined the assembly in the year 2008 and the others in 2013 and we are proud that the MQM is the only political party that brings people from the lower-middle class to the parliament and the credit for this goes to our party chief Altaf Hussain,” he maintained.
“We came to the House empty-handed and leaving it empty-handed. Our conscience is clear and record shows that.”
Hasan said MQM lawmakers continued to serve in the assembly for the cause of the people and unconditionally supported the PPP to bridge the urban and rural gap, but their voices were not heard.
“We knocked every door, from the judiciary to the government, but all went in vain.”
Criticising the provincial government for its poor performance, Hasan said during its last seven-year tenure, the PPP had grabbed all the province’s resources and its leadership was reluctant to expose the corruption under way in the province even though the MQM had taken up the matter several times with it.
“During these years, we tolerated them because their leader had been martyred and had even supported its co-chairman in becoming the presidential of the country.”
Hasan said the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which had almost no strength in the provincial assembly, was also blaming the MQM for the situation in Sindh. “We had pointed out several times about the problem of land grabbers and drug mafias that were creating a law and order problem in Karachi but unfortunately, the MQM has been targeted instead.”
The MQM lawmaker said many journalists and politicians of other parties had also worked in connivance with the PPP government in its corrupt practices and the MQM too was offered to become a part of it.
Syed Sardar Ahmed, a senior MQM lawmaker, said the only reason that the party’s legislators had quit the assembly was that they were the people’s representatives and there was no purpose of carrying on if the masses’ issues were not being addressed.
“We tried tirelessly to have our people’s issues resolved, but the apathy of the government had disheartened us,” he added.
The MQM lawmakers said the law-enforcement agencies, particularly Rangers, were clearly trying to impose the PTI in Karachi by marginalising the MQM. Besides, they added, the criminals operating under the name of MQM-Haqqiqi were also being officially patronised similar to the situation during the operation clean-up of 1992.