MATIARI: Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) emir Sirajul Haq has said that the Pakistan Democratic Movement is striving to protect the interests of a few families.

He was speaking at a reception hosted in his honour by Sindh Abadgar Board (SAB) representative and progressive farmer from Matiari, Nadeem Shah, on Tuesday.

The JI chief said he saw no difference in the policies of the PDM and the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) on agriculture, education and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

He claimed that Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari had told PDM chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman that there would be no talk of enforcement of Islam from the PDM platform. He said the JI stood as a third option in politics and people should support it as the PDM component parties had disappointed the masses. The main components, PPP and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), destroyed the national economy during their tenures.

He claimed that the prime minister had himself admitted his failure. The PM had said he could not bring about ‘change’ within five years, Mr Haq said. Even if he served for 10 years, he would do the same things and blame the past governments, he added.

‘PTI govt surviving on oxygen; it will collapse if the cylinder is removed’

If a government could not perform in 1,000 days, it could not do anything even if it served for another 15 to 20 months.

He said the PTI got a fake majority to form government. It was surviving on oxygen and as soon as the [oxygen] cylinder was removed, it would collapse, he added.

The government issued presidential ordinances because it could not satisfy parliamentarians in the elected houses, he said. The presidency was working like an ordinance factory which negated democratic society and culture.

The Supreme Court should understand that on one hand a presidential reference was moved to it while on the other an ordinance was also issued on open vote issue in the Senate.

Sharing his experience as member of elected houses, he said he felt that most lawmakers represented imperialist forces to protect the system. Such people, he added, had been imposed on the masses; they betrayed elders as they used to polish boots of their masters; they came from the clans of Mir Jaffar and Mir Sadiq.

He said people were deceived in the name of democracy. There were parties that did not hold party elections, even then they talked about democracy.

No party awarded Senate ticket on merit, he said, quoting a senator as saying that he became senator to enjoy the protocol at airport where he was not required to be in queue.

He said labourers were represented by factory owners and growers by bureaucrats in the system. “There is life in rebellion. People need to challenge it [system] which made Pakistan lose geography,” he said.

The JI chief said 85 per cent of people were drinking unclean water. He said Karachi remained the biggest unclean city of the world environmentally, but its people survived.

He said that when a nation failed in politics, everything right from religion to ideology was lost. Successful politics made a nation victorious. Taj Mahal stood intact because the Muslims were politically powerful, he said.

He said the leaders imposed on the masses got dictation from Washington and not from Madina. He said today people had lost politics in the country.

He said that as finance minister, he made KP a debt-free province.

Former premier Shaukat Aziz gave him Rs1.4bn on the basis of better financial management and utilization in line with international standards while the World Bank country director in an IMF meeting had appreciated his performance as KP finance minister, he said.

He said he had not studied in Harvard or Oxford, but Maulana Maududi had trained him.

He said Pakistan was rich in resources.

The federal government admitted that the country was losing water worth $600bn which was in fact gold, he said, criticising that the PTI set a new record of corruption for which Transparency Interna­tional ‘appreciated’ it and the country lost four points in ranking.

The JI leader said industrialists had shifted to Malaysia and Bangladesh and there was rise in unemployment in the country.

One needed to do PhD to understand what Imran Khan said as according to the PM, prices of commodities had increased, but there was decline in price hike, he said.

Mehmood Nawaz Shah said that policymakers had failed to come up with agriculture-friendly policies in the country.

He said that one needed to analyse whether the 18th Amendment indeed benefited agriculture which ensured 65pc of exports and 43pc of employment.

He said Rs1,300bn was disbursed by the present government but not a single penny was earmarked to agriculture. Foreign exchange was being wasted on importing cotton bales. Nobody checked why sugar price was increasing.

During the reception, the JI chief appointed the host, Nadeem Shah, the party’s central political cell member from Matiari.

Other JI leaders Asadullah Bhutto, Mohammad Hussain Mahenti, A. Waheed Qureshi, SAB president Abdul Majeed Nizamani, Mahmood Nawaz Shah and Nadeem Shah also spoke.

Published in Dawn, February 17th, 2021