MQM-P, JI intensify efforts to make rallies for Karachi’s rights successful

The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan and the Jamaat-e-Islami have intensified their preparatory activities to show their strength in the rallies they will be staging later this month to pressure the federal and Sindh governments to solve the problems that the residents of Karachi have been facing and to provide the city with its due rights.

The MQM-P will organise a rally on September 22 that will start from Karimabad and end at the Mazar-e-Quaid, the JI has planned to stage a huge rally under the banner of the Huqooq-e-Karachi Tehreek on Shahrah-e-Quaideen on September 27.

Members of both parties in the city’s various neighbourhoods have been holding meetings with residents and distributing pamphlets asking them to attend their rallies in maximum numbers for the rights of Karachi, according to leaders of both parties.

The MQM-P leaders said on Friday that the party’s leaders in the neighbourhoods were mobilising the residents, who were angered by the Sindh government for appointing “non-local officers” as administrators in cities across the province.

Reiterating their demand for a separate province comprising the province’s urban parts, they said Karachi had been destroyed in the past few years, but the Pakistan Peoples Party’s “biased” provincial government had not been demonstrating seriousness.

The JI Karachi has also intensified its activities to make its rally on September 27 successful. The party’s central chief, Sirajul Haq, will attend. On Friday, JI Karachi chief Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman spoke to a rally outside Noman Masjid at Lasbela Chowk, where he said the recent rains had exposed the performance of all layers of the governments. “The September 27 rally will highlight the problems of Karachi, which the city has been facing for decades,” he said.