LARKANA: Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) Sindh general secretary Maulana Rashid Mehmood Soomro has criticised police’s role during violence in the course of nationalist parties’ protest outside Bahria Town Karachi’s gates and said Sindh government was attempting to hush up illegal allotment of land to BTK.

He said at a press conference at Larkana Press Club on Sunday that the party would launch protest campaign in the province on June 17 against federal and Sindh government’s failure to deliver goods.

He said that in the first phase, demonstrations would be held throughout the province outside local press clubs in district headquarters and in the second phase Sindh’s issues would be raised in Pakistan Democratic Movement’s public meeting in Karachi on June 29.

In the third phase, he said, a long march would be held from Ghtoki to Karachi. Both centre and Sindh government were damaging Sindh’s interests by dishing out islands and precious land to builders, ignoring development schemes and exploiting Sindh’s coal reserves but neglecting local Tharis.

He said the land allotted to Bahria Town was more than the total area of Islamabad.

He criticised Sindh government for ruthlessly trampling over indigenous peoples’ rights. Instead of initiating action against illegal occupants, the Sindh government had trained its guns on protesters and lodged cases against nationalist leaders -- Syed Jalal Mehmood Shah, Sanan Qureshi, Dr Qadir Magsi and others while crackdown against Dr Niaz Kalani, Ayaz Latif Palijo continued whole night.

He slammed Sindh minister Saeed Ghani’s statement in which he had accused MQM of committing violence at Bahria Town and said it the minister was true then what was the justification for booking hundreds of protesters and registering cases against nationalist leaders.

He said that police’s role during the violent protest was questionable as they remained silent spectators while Bahria’s gates were being torched and properties damaged.

He accused Sindh government of hushing up its illegalities in allotting land to Bahria Town at the rate of Rs1 per foot.

He demanded immediate release of Sanan Qureshi and others arrested under various cases and called for judicial inquiry into the violence and damage caused to properties by the miscreants.

If transparency was observed, he was confident, Sindh government would be found responsible for the riots, he said, adding one must probe the fact how a peaceful protest turned violent.

He flayed Bilawal Bhutto’s stance over the arrest of Khursheed Shah’s son and called it duplicity as he kept mum over the arrests and registration of cases against peaceful protesters but shed tears over the arrest of Shah’s son.

Despite a long rule, PPP had failed to deliver, he said. The prolonged power outage, battered local bodies performance, price spiral, rising graph of unemployment, sale of Sindh’s land at throwaway price, acute shortage of irrigation water, poor health services paired with deteriorating education, increase in street crime, rampant corruption and utter neglect of agriculture had made peoples’ lives miserable, he said. Police were fleecing traders on the pretext of Covid-19 pandemic, he said.

Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2021