Abduction, torture of party workers: Subzwari discloses MQMP was forced to rejoin Imran cabinet

KARACHI: Federal Minister for Maritime Affairs and Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) Senator Faisal Subzwari said on Thursday that the Supreme Court or the chief justice of Pakistan did not have the powers to write the constitution or add or subtract anything from it.

Speaking with Hamid Mir in the Geo News programme Capital Talk, he said only parliament had the right to amend the constitution. He recalled that the Supreme Court had given the powers to amend the constitution to former military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf, but even amendments made in his era had to be brought to parliament.

The MQM-P leader stated that even lawyers’ bodies had opined that the Supreme Court had rewritten the constitution in its Article 63-A judgment.

He said the constitution clearly stipulates that any legislator who votes against the decision of their parliamentary party will be disqualified, but the chief justice and two other judges observed that such legislators cannot even vote though it is not written in the constitution. He asked if the Supreme Court decision was in contradiction with this clear provision of the Constitution.

Subzwari said that according to the constitution, elections have to be held under 90 days after the dissolution of assemblies, but it is also written in the constitution that holding free and fair elections is the responsibility of the Election Commission of Pakistan. He said that despite the Supreme Court order, the elections were not going to be held within the 90 days. He quoted the chief justice as saying that if any judge had erred in a decision inadvertently, that judge could correct it after realising that error. “Tomorrow, parliament can also say this.”

The MQM-P leader said a chief justice was for the regularisation of One Constitutional Avenue because there were apartments of the elite class there, but he ordered the demolition of the Nasla Tower in Karachi at any cost.

He said Imran Khan would not accept the electoral results of Punjab in case his party did not get a majority.

Subzwari said he was an MQM worker whose three generations were arrested, and even extrajudicial murders were committed in his home.

He said that in December 2019, Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui resigned in protest from the cabinet of Imran Khan after which negotiations continued between the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and the MQM-P till following March when the MQM-P all of a sudden got the order to rejoin the cabinet.

Subzwari said the party told those who had given the order that it could not rejoin the cabinet before its demands were met. He added that as the MQM-P refused to comply with the order, its seven workers were detained and tortured, which forced the party to rejoin the cabinet of Imran Khan. He said he had told Khan in front of many others that he was sitting with him out of compulsion.

The federal minister was of the view that no political worker should be implicated in false cases. He said no other political party had enjoyed that leverage in the past, which the PTI was enjoying right now.

He said when Shehbaz Gill tried to instigate mutiny in the army on a television channel, he had remarked that Gill should be thankful that he belonged to Faisalabad, not Karachi.

He recalled that MQM leaders were booked in 27 terrorism cases in a single day over listening to an incendiary speech. He maintained that many of those leaders who were booked in those cases were even not in Pakistan when the incident occurred.