Karachi pays 250 billion rupees in taxes, but the money goes to the ruling family of the Pakistan Peoples Party, alleged Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, convener of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) on Tuesday.
He was speaking at a ‘Karachi Traders Conference’, which his party organised at the park adjacent to its headquarters in Bahadurabad for consultation on the controversial LG bill passed by the provincial assembly.
The conference unanimously rejected the local government bill recently passed by the Pakistan Peoples Party’s provincial government, and demanded a strong, comprehensive and autonomous city government system, mainly for the city, the country’s business hub that pays 70 per cent revenue to the Centre and 95 per cent to Sindh.
Trader leaders Atiq Mir, Jamil Paracha, Hakeem Shah and Rizwan Irfan were prominent among the participants, who said the municipal bodies under the recently passed law would be “toothless”, and instead of resolving the civic issues the residents and traders were facing, the new law would worsen the situation.
MQM-P leader Siddiqui accused the Sindh government of taking over all municipal bodies, an act he said was against the defined rule of Article 140-A of the constitution. He said the country had been running with the taxes of Karachi’s traders, but nobody was serious about resolving the city’s issues.
He said his party had used all methods of a civilised society for rights. “Half of Karachi’s population disappeared [according to the 2017 census], and we went to the judiciary but could not get justice.”
Siddiqui said that in consultation with traders, civil society groups and political parties, the MQM-P would devise a strategy for an empowered local government system that would resolve the city’s civic issues.
For the past five years, he said, the MQM-P alone had been opposing the local government bill, but today the entire Pakistan agreed with us and opposed the “biased” legislation of the PPP.
He said the MQM-P, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) had been working together to prepare a draft “which we will present in the assembly and the courts with the support of the people”.
Siddiqui said the participants of the conference had pledged to give constitutional protection to the third tier of the democratic government, make it financially, politically and administratively empowered and transfer powers from province to division, district, Tehsil and union council level.
After approaching the traders, he added, the party would ask the industrialists to join the campaign for an empowered local government.
Among others, the traders’ leaders who attended the conference were Sheikh Habib, Muhammad Arshad, Shakir Fancy, Rafiq Jadoon of the Bolton Market association, Abdullah Bata, Aslam Bhatti and Asif Gulfam of the Aram Bagh Traders Alliance, Ilyas of the Tariq Road association, Shah Zaman of the marriage lawns association, Saleem Memon and Javed Siddiqui from the Karachi Electronic Dealers Association, Sheikh Irshad from Jama Cloth Market, and Alam Sheikh from the Old City Area association.
