JI to award youths 50pc tickets for general elections, says Haq

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) chief Senator Siraj-ul-Haq has said his party will award 50 per cent of its parliamentary tickets to youths in the upcoming general election to increase their representation in the elected houses of the country.

“Currently, there are only two members [out of the directly elected 272] in the National Assembly who are under 30, whereas youth representation at such platforms in the world is around 10 per cent,” he said, while talking to journalists in Liaquatabad on Sunday.

Haq said the youth made 65 per cent of Pakistan’s population of over 207 million counted in the latest census, but in the prevalent situation, 49 per cent of them were thinking of moving from the country, according to a survey.

Citing other figures from the survey, he added that seven million had already moved abroad in search of better opportunities, and 6.7 million had indulged in drugs due to temper tantrums, putting their future at stake.

He was speaking on the occasion of the second round of the JI’s youth intra-party elections. He said that his party would hold a convention of the youth leadership on May 6 in Karachi and would chalk out the future course of action.

Mentioning Shaheer Niazi, the 17-year-old A levels student who researched on electric honeycomb in 2017, and gone-too-soon Arfa Karim, who at the age of nine became the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in 2004, Haq said: “The country’s youth are highly talented.”

He said the JI wanted to relive the libraries and laboratories in the country to produce people like Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the scientist who put in efforts to make Pakistan a nuclear power. He added that because of corrupt and incompetent rulers, the country lagged behind in the world.

Haq said that at a time when the world was landing on the Moon and Mars, 22 million of the country’s children were not even going to school. He criticised the government’s policy to spend as low as 2.6 per cent of the country’s budget on education while keeping a larger share just to maintain their VIP lifestyles.