Sirajul Haq urges govt not to delay relief package

LAHORE:Jamaat-i-Islami ameer Senator Sirajul Haq has warned that if the PTI government still stayed away from announcing a relief package for low-income groups, including exempting less than 25,000 per month earners from utility bills, it would be remembered in history as the most cruel and heartless regime.

The government should deal with the people like a mother deals with her children, he said while addressing the media and workers on Friday at a coronavirus awareness camp set up by the JI on Mall Road, where he also distributed sanitiser, masks and soaps among people. He lamented that the developed world had spent trillions of dollars on producing huge piles of weapons enough to destroy the world eleven times, adding that if the resources had instead been used on human development and health, the world would not have been frightened from a virus today. He said if the government had taken timely and effective measures on the Taftan border, the virus would not have spread in the country.

Sirajul Haq offered all medical and health resources of JI’s sister organisation, Al-Khidmat Foundation, at the disposal of the government to deal with the threat, including all of its hospitals, dispensaries, thousands of workers, hundreds of ambulances, medicines etc. He appealed to the government to immediately take measures for preventing the virus and providing two meals to poor workers in the country. He demanded that patients should not be kept with healthy and suspected persons in the quarantine camps, and all basic facilities should be provided at the camps.

Allah’s forgiveness: Tanzeem-e-Islami (TI) ameer Hafiz Aakif Saeed said the scare and panic across the world in the wake of coronavirus was no doubt a kind of the wrath of Allah Almighty, befalling largely on the developed world and their oppressor rulers who had subjected innocent Muslims to persecution and genocide over the last 50 years.

In a statement on Friday, he said the developed world had kept silence over USA, Israel, India and Europe committing atrocities against Muslims. Now those subjecting Muslims to curfews were being forced to lock down their own countries. Their streets and markets are vacant like those of a ghost town. The European countries that had made laws to prohibit Muslim women from covering their faces with veils have been subdued by Allah Almighty in such a way that not only their women, but men, too, have been forced to cover their faces with masks.

He appealed to the believers to make special supplications and repent collectively, along with taking other preventive measures for protection against the virus. He said the degree of fear created due to Covid-19 was massive and had the fear of Allah been imbibed on a similar magnitude amongst people they would have become free of all kinds of torments, but the entire world would have benefitted from global peace and prosperity. He said the trials, tribulations and wraths are inflicted upon us by Allah due to our own corrupt and depraved deeds, and we can get salvation from them only by reverting to Allah by beseeching His forgiveness and genuinely repenting for all our transgressions.