JI announces long march on March 14 as part of movement for Karachi’s rights

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Karachi Emir Hafiz Naeemur Rehman on Monday announced that the party would hold a massive march on March 14 that would start in Quaidabad and end at the Governor House.

He said the JI’s movement for the rights of Karachi aimed at resolving the issues of every citizen of Karachi, a city called mini-Pakistan where people speaking all languages of the country lived.

If Karachi developed, the whole country would develop, the JI city chief said, adding that for the development and prosperity of Karachi, the party would hold the march on March 14 and announce its future course of action at the Governor House.

He directed workers and officials of the party to make extensive arrangements and preparations to make the march successful. He was addressing a gathering of the party’s members at the Idara Noor-e-Haq.

The JI leader claimed that the party’s movement for the rights of Karachi was getting tremendous welcome from the people as for many years, the JI had been the only party raising cocern over the basic issues and problems of the city.

He went on to say that the people of Karachi had become disillusioned with the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P). Practically, nothing had been done for the people of Karachi, he said, adding that the three political parties had only made false promises to the people of the city.

He said that whereas the federal government, in which the PTI and MQM-Pakistan were coalition partners, approved the results of the controversial census results, the PPP in the Sindh government also took no measure to get the flawed census count rectified.

Half of the population of Karachi had disappeared in the census count, he lamented as he demanded that the census results be corrected. The PPP was not ready to hold local body elections in Sindh on the basis of the last census and wanted to occupy all the local bodies in Sindh, including those of Karachi, the JI leader alleged.