The Sindhi nationalists’s census monitoring committee has threatened to protest if certain irregularities are not fixed.
A press conference was held at the Karachi Press Club on Friday when leaders of nationalist parties criticised the ruling coalition partners, especially the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). They accused the MQM of trying to take control of the census in Karachi, Hyderabad and other towns and thus jeopardise the transparency of the process.
They maintained that most census workers were using blank papers and photocopied forms rather than the printed books supplied by the government. “In many cases, they are working in pencil, which is likely to be manipulated to generate wrong data,” they said.
“We will lodge our protest and produce a record of all the irregularities, along with other evidence, before the provincial census commissioner on Saturday (today),” said the committee’s Jalal Mehmood Shah. He claimed that they were not selecting enumerators from the education department according to the police. “Instead, the water board and city government employees are being engaged in urban areas.”
Five million flood-affected families are still living in makeshift homes and are likely to be left out of the count, he added. Apart from flood survivors, many people live in far-flung areas, such as the coastal belt, kachcha area, deserts and forested areas, and are also difficult get in touch with. “We emphasise that special arrangements be made to properly count islands where many fishermen live,” he said.
Moving on to talk about refugees, Shah said that over three million illegal immigrants from India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma and other countries should be registered separately in a non-resident category.
They have also received a lot of complaints about the house count, he added. “The census staff is neither properly trained nor equipped and a number of villages in remote districts have been omitted because they are using an old map,” he said. In fact, several houses in rural settlements have been grouped together and given a single number. “The situation in Karachi is totally different, even shops, pushcarts and toilets have been assigned a separate number to favour a particular ethnic community,” he accused.
Sindh Tarraqi Pasand Party’s (STPP) Dr Rajab Ali Memon added that there have been reports that a large number of “paid community helpers” from ethnic parties are helping with the census, He claimed that these people are deliberately ignoring Sindhi areas and making the whole house count unreliable.
“We ask the government to take corrective measures otherwise Sindhi people retain the right to launch a massive struggle to protect their status as a majority.”
Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz’s Bashir Qureshi, Dr Safdar Sarki and STPP’s Ali Hassan Chandio also spoke.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 16th, 2011.
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