The project for the destruction of Karachi was started by the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). Later, the project gained momentum when the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) got the administrative control of the city. And finally, it was the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) that completely ruined the city and created bumpy roads everywhere through its worst administration and policies.
Muhammad Ashraf Jabbar Qureshi, the mayoral candidate of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) for the upcoming local government elections in Karachi, said this during an interview with The News.
Rejecting the JI’s claims about development of Karachi during the tenure of Niamatullah Khan as the city’s nazim, he said the JI had done nothing for the city apart from making tall claims. He went on to say that the JI claimed the late Niamatullah started mega development projects in the city but none of the JI leaders could point out those projects that were completed in the tenure of Khan.
“If the late Niamatullah Khan had built parks, roads, schools and water supply schemes in the city, why were those projects not sustainable for two decades and where are those projects located so that the people of Karachi could derive benefit from them?” he asked.
The PTI leader remarked that the JI leaders wished to build Karachi by only uttering sweet words. Responding to a question, he said the people of Karachi would always vote for Imran Khan because the MQM had suppressed them for years. Now the public knows that the MQM and PPP were the actual cause of their suffering, he added.
“MQM leaders were involved in selling footpaths, parks and playgrounds and even today they collect extortion in the name of charged parking. Everyone knows about the MQM’s China-cutting scams. The party even recruited Muslim sanitary workers against the Non-Muslim quota, due to which the city became a heap of garbage,” Qureshi alleged.
He explained that the PTI’s manifesto clearly mentioned the devolution of powers to the local bodies. However, he added, the Sindh government was not ready to decentralise power and strengthen the local governments in the province.
“In spite of the political rivalry with the Sindh government, the PTI-led federal government allocated 100 per cent budget for the completion of the K-IV project. It also completed the Green Line project, inaugurated the circular railway project and provided around 50 firefighting vehicles to the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC),” the PTI leader said in response to the question what his party had done for the city when it was in power for over three years in the federal government.
When asked whether after being elected as the Karachi mayor, he would resort to pressure tactics like loading garbage in a truck to dump that in front of the Chief Minister's House, which PTI MNA Alamgir Khan had done in the past, he said he did not believe in carrying out such publicity stunts.
“Alamgir Khan wanted to become popular. It was nothing but a publicity stunt of a #FixIt leader. #FixIt has nothing do to with the PTI,” Qureshi remarked as he insisted that the activities of Alamgir as the #FixIt leader should not be construed as the PTI’s activities.
He was of the view that a major overhaul was necessary in the organisational and departmental structure of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC). Criticising the MQM-Pakistan, he said that when Muttahida was in power, it recruited thousands of people in the municipal corporations, due to which it became difficult for the KMC administration to pay salaries. “Even the development budget of the KMC is being spent on the payment of salaries.”
Equally critical of the PPP, he said that instead of raising the standards of underprivileged areas of the city, the PPP downgraded the posh areas by bringing them to the level of slums. He sarcastically remarked that credit should be given to the PPP for ensuring equality in the metropolis as the residents of Surjani Town and DHA were now facing the same problems and both the areas were full of garbage and had been facing water shortage.
Responding to a question, he stressed that there was no need for initiating new development projects in Karachi. “If I am elected, I will ban new projects because I will be focusing to ensure full functionalisation of the already existing schemes.”
He said that he was fully prepared for the mayoral job as the PTI had surveyed every nook and cranny of the city. “Our slogan for the LG election is ‘Khuddar and Khudmukhtar Karachi’ [self-sufficient and autonomous Karachi] and under this slogan, we demand that the mayor be given all the necessary powers,” he added.
Qureshi reiterated the PTI’s lack of trust in the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), saying that the commission had included the names of dead persons in the current voters list, which showed how incompetent it was.
The PTI has reservations about delimitations and the 2017 national census, he said. He explained that since the PPP had made union committees arbitrarily, some UCs in the city had only 6,000 people while others had 20,000 to 90,000 persons.
The PTI leader was of the view that Karachi attracted people from all over the country, due to which it should be treated as a cosmopolitan city. The PTI mayor would demand a special quota for Karachi from the federal government to ensure facilities and jobs for the families whose second or third generations were living in the city.
On the issue of the displacement of more than 6,000 families due to the anti-encroachment drive along the Gujjar and Orangi nullahs, Qureshi said that the Sindh government had promised to provide alternative land for the resettlement of such people, while the PTI’s federal government had agreed on providing rent to them for temporary accommodations until they got the alternative land.
He claimed that the federal government kept its promise but the provincial government reneged on it, due to which those people were still homeless. “If I became the mayor of Karachi, the first thing I will be doing is the resettlement of those families,” he declared.
