close
Friday March 29, 2024

PML-F criticises police, govt for ‘action against Goth residents’

By Our Correspondent
March 28, 2018

Nusrat Seher Abbasi, an opposition MPA in the Sindh Assembly and the president of Pakistan Muslim-League-Functional’s provincial women’s wing, has lashed out at the Sindh government and police for their alleged crackdown against Goth settlements in the city’s suburbs.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, the lawmaker called the police “cowardly” for trying to evict residents of Goths from their homes and the also flayed the Sindh government for acting in a “cowardly manner” by silently backing the operation to expel residents of Sindhi-speaking Goth settlements from their homes.

According to the statement, the police had resorted to “such undue action against Sindhi-speaking population of a number of old village settlements in surroundings of Pipri and Gulshan-e-Hadeed”. It added that the dwellers of Lal Mohammad Marri Goth, Soomar Goth, Ali Mohammad Goth, Himayati Goth and others were subjected to undue harsh treatment.

Abbasi said that influential people of the area, backed by the police, were bent upon expelling thousands of Goth dwellers through use of force.

The Sindh government has been acting as a silent spectator in the entire episode as if action against the Goth residents was being taken in connivance with the provincial authorities concerned, the statement added, quoting the lawmaker.

She further said that Goth residents have been left with no option but to resort to agitation against the police action.

Abbasi said that her party, which sits in the opposition in the Sindh Assembly, would not allow the forced expulsion of Goth dwellers from their homes. The Sindh government too would have to face stiff resistance if it doesn’t change its callous policy against the Goth dwellers, she added.