Afaq asks disgruntled MQM-P workers to join Haqiqi

Muhajir Qaumi Movement-Haqiqi Chairman Afaq Ahmed has opened his arms for disgruntled and dejected Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) workers to join his party.

“This is the first time that we welcome them,” Ahmed said in a press conference at his residence in DHA on Monday. “We were being asked by many of them, but we tend not to induct them because of uncertainty about their past.”

Referring to the criminal activities of MQM workers, he said that his party apprehended that they did not know who came from where and after doing what. “Had they been arrested, then it could have been infamy for the MQM-Haqiqi.”

Mentioning the political “dry cleaning” process in which even the proclaimed offenders came out clean by joining some political parties, he said that such re-engineering bids would beget negative results. “When there was no Altaf Hussain, the people of urban Sindh chosen Fatima Jinnah as their representative. Even when the religious parties enjoyed the sway in Karachi, the representatives were Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani, Prof Ghafoor Ahmed and likes.”

He said the imported leadership would do no good to the city and instead the situation would worsen. He added that vacuum that had been created in urban parts of the province could only be filled by the representatives from the same populace. The MQM-H chief remarked that he was also a stakeholder and collectively they could do some good for the Urdu-speaking community that had suffered a setback over their representation in the Senate because of the fight between the PIB Colony and Bahadurabad groups of the MQM-P.

Ahmed claimed that he had asked the respectable elders in the Muhajir community to intervene in the infighting between the Bahadurabad and PIB groups and had personally called Farooq Sattar and Amir Khan to resolve it as soon as possible or put it on the backburner until the Senate polls. “But they would not listen,” he said.