MQM-P temporarily ends protest after highlighting ‘PPP’s excesses against urban centres’

Announcing an end to the protest outside the Sindh Assembly temporarily, Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan leaders said on Saturday that the main objective of the protest was to highlight the excesses of the PPP-led administration that had ignored the province’s urban areas, including Karachi, in the budget 2020-21

The protest sit-in, which had been organised by MQM-P lawmakers outside the provincial assembly, and a boycott of the assembly’s proceedings, lasted three days.

Talking to media persons, MQM-P parliamentary leader Kunwar Naveed Jameel rejected the proposed budget and alleged that the provincial government had shown ethnic bias against urban centres in the allocation of funds in the budget.

“We are temporarily ending the protest, but soon we will launch a protest against the provincial government at a large scale for ignoring the urban centres of the province,” he said.

“Residents of the province’s urban centers, traders and civil society activists will also be asked to take part in the MQM-P’s protest against the injustices and the Pakistan Peoples Party’s biased provincial government.”

The MQM-P leader said Karachi contributed around 95 per cent of the total revenue to the province, but in return it hardly got anything from the ruling centres. “In the past 12 years, the Sindh government has completely ignored the province’s urban centres,” he said.

Jameel said the MQM-P had given concrete proposals to the Sindh government for the development and progress of the urban areas, but the provincial government did not incorporate any one of them in the budget.

He said the party had informed the Sindh ministers who had visited his party’s protest camp that the MQM-P would not be silent on the excesses being committed against the urban centres.

The MQM-P leader accused the government of being anti-people for its failure to address the issue of water scarcity in the province’s urban centres, and said the water crisis in Karachi had turned grave as people were facing agony and physical torture for want of water.