MQM-P’s doors open for independent candidates: Khalid Maqbool

After the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) won most of the seats from Karachi, the party convener, Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, said on Friday the party’s doors were open for independent candidates.

In an apparent reference to the use of money in buying loyalties of the independent candidates to form governments as witnessed in the past, Dr Siddiqui said the MQM-P did not have a briefcase to offer to anyone.

He was speaking to a gathering organised at Pakistan House, which served as the election headquarters for the party, to celebrate its victory in Karachi in the 2024 general polls. He said the party had a three-point agenda to bring a real change in the country. “We want to empower the people of the country and take Pakistan in the right direction,” he added.

He credited the success of the MQM-P to slain party workers as well as those who were incarcerated and who had been forcibly disappeared following their alleged arrests by the country’s law enforcement agencies.

The party’s senior deputy convener and former Karachi mayor Mustafa Kamal said the Jamaat-e-Islami should now accept the people’s verdict and hand over the city back to the MQM-P.

Kamal mocked the JI’s mandate in the local government elections by terming it a charity it had received as a result of the MQM-P’s boycott of the 2023 local government elections in Karachi. He said the JI-elected representatives should resign from their public offices.

In the meantime, MQM-P Senior Deputy Convener Dr Farooq Sattar took a jibe at the Pakistan Peoples Party-backed Karachi mayor Murtaza Wahab, saying that he should have the moral courage to leave the mandate he occupied through political engineering and let the ‘real’ heirs of Karachi to run the city. He commented that the current local government system could not work and it must be abolished. Sindh Governor Kamran Tessori was also present on the occasion.