ECP deprived Karachiites of right to vote in LG polls, alleges Kamal

Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan leader Syed Mustafa Kamal has said that instead of giving the right to vote, the Election Commission of Pakistan conducted the local bodies polls based on incorrect constituencies, depriving the people of their basic right.

He said the Sindh government, in talks with the MQM-Pakistan, had also admitted that it had made wrong constituencies by merging rural areas with urban ones in Hyderabad and now the mayor can never come from urban areas.

In a statement, Kamal said that the Urdu-speaking population in Karachi was not counted correctly so that the Sindh government could bring its own mayor. If all the parties had waited for the conduct of local government polls for one month, Karachi would have got its rights after the new constituencies, he said.

He said that the demand of the MQM-Pakistan was to fix the constituencies and add 53 UCs to Karachi immediately, and for this reason, the Sindh government suspended the constituencies under Section 10A.

After that, he said, the election commission should have implemented it immediately and annulled “these biased constituencies” to conduct transparent elections. Kamal said the MQM-P would continue to fight for the rights of Karachi’s people until all their problems were solved. “If Karachi gets the right, it is a win for all of us.”

A day earlier, MQM-P convener Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui had told a press conference in Hyderabad that the rulers had changed the demography of the urban areas of Sindh after the census in 2017. “We filed appeals in the Supreme Court as well as high court. None of the courts rejected our claim,” he said.