MANSEHRA: Residents of Dubair and Ranowalia areas in Lower Kohistan district on Friday blocked the Karakoram Highway to protest Wapda’s failure to honour a 2022 agreement for road reconstruction and water supply.

The highway’s closure inconvenienced people traveling between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan.

“The Wapda chairman signed an agreement with us in a jirga two years ago for reconstructing 28km Dubair Road and 6km Ranowali Road and supplying potable water to us, but no progress has been made on it,” former provincial minister Malik Aurangzeb told protesters in Dubair area amid sloganeering against Wapda.

Mr Aurangzeb said neither Wapda nor the government had made any effort to address residents’ grievances despite street protests.

Protest Wapda’s failure to rebuild roads, supply drinking water

Another speaker, Malik Salahuddin, pointed out that the Wapda chairman, during a 2022 meeting with Dubair Khawar project’s victims, promised to reconstruct two local roads and rehabilitate drinking water schemes damaged by flash floods with the World Bank’s assistance, but that hadn’t happened yet.

On the occasion, chairman of the Dubair Bala village council Juma Shah Jallali said that Wapda should ensure the safety of people downstream from the Dubair Khawar hydropower project.

“The commissioner of Hazara division has invited us to Abbottabad for talks but we want him to speak to us on our soil in the presence of all stakeholders,” he said.

The protesters dispersed three hours later, clearing the highway to traffic.

POLL CONTROVERSY: A group led by former MPA Mufti Kifayatullah on Friday challenged the recent elections for the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl’s district emir and general secretary posts and demanded cancellation of poll results.

In a letter to chairman of the JUI-F’s intra-party election committee Maulana Attaullah Haq Darwash, Qazi Habibur Rehman, a candidate for the district emir’s slot, claimed that he and his group’s other nominee weren’t allowed electioneering and the rival group’s former senator Hidayatullah Shah and Maulana Nasir Mehmood were unfairly declared the district emir and general secretary respectively unopposed.

Mr Rehman, the elder brother of Mufti Kifayatullah, insisted that the provincial election commission issued 900 ballot papers to members of the party’s general body but the number surged to over 1,400 in a questionable manner.

He called for the cancellation of election results over discrepancies and fresh yet fair electoral exercise.

Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2024