Sindh Information and Labour Minister Saeed Ghani has completely ruled out the possibility of reviving the municipal system in the province envisaged under the Sindh Local Government Ordinance 2001 during Gen Pervez Musharraf’s regime.
Addressing a press conference on Wednesday, he said in clear terms that no matter how long any protest sit-in continued outside the Sindh Assembly, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) would not accept any demand for the complete revival of the local government system of the Musharraf era.
In an apparent reference to the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) that has been staging a sit-in outside the Sindh Assembly for several days against the new local government law, Ghani said the promulgation of the Sindh Local Government Ordinance 2001 was out of question and anyone doing agitation on roads for that cause was doing a futile exercise.
He announced that the Sindh government was ready to face the situation of protests if the deadlock with the opposition political parties in the province persisted.
The provincial government was open to suggestions for improving the provincial local government law but the opposition parties should also have the same attitude and valid proposals given by them would be incorporated to improve the municipal system of the province, he said.
The information minister remarked that the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) should keep in mind that it was the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), not the Sindh government, that was responsible for carrying out the delimitation of constituencies for conducting the local government elections in the province.
He explained that in this regard, the Sindh government was only empowered to determine the number of union councils in an area.
He told the media that the Sindh government had agreed to revive town municipal administrations in Karachi after amending the Sindh Local Government Act 2013 in accordance with the consensus demand of all the opposition parties in the province.
Ghani said that he himself and many other members of the PPP had been in favour of retaining the system of district municipal administrations in Karachi but the desire of the opposition was given preference.
Criticising the MQM, he said that although the MQM claimed the ownership of Karachi but it did not even know about the history of the famous Gulshan-e-Iqbal area of the city. The neighbourhood was not named after the national poet of Pakistan, Allama Iqbal, as it was named after a person, Iqbal Khaskheli, who had built a Goth in the area, he added.
The information minister said the opposition parties in their press conferences had been unduly criticising the Sindh government for not providing them the maps of new delimitations. He clarified that the maps could not be drawn till the ECP had completed the process of delimitations.
He was of the view that the MQM and JI should not destroy the peace of Karachi and push the city to the brink of bloodshed for securing their political interests. He said the JI had been following in the footsteps of the MQM to gain political popularity in Karachi.
Ghani said the JI had displayed banners in the city carrying the slogan that Karachi had been under occupation. He asked the opposition party to clearly tell under whose occupation the city had been.