Activists chant slogans during a protest organised by Sooba Hazara Tehrik outside the Parliament House on Wednesday. PHOTO: MUHAMMAD JAVAID/EXPRESS
The Hazara Awami Assembly has announced to go on a hunger strike until the acceptance of their demand of the creation of Hazara province. They will go on strike from February 3.
The assembly, a conglomerate of Hazara Qaumi Mahaz, Hazara Awami Itehad, Tehrik Suba Hazara Haqeeki, Jamaat-e-Islami, Tehrik Shuhada-e-Hazara and Ulema Council, held a meeting at Abbottabad Bar Club on Wednesday. Lawyers and activists of Pakistan Peoples Party were also present on the occasion.
The speakers accused the government of ignoring their demands while it tended to the creation of Seraiki Janoobi Punjab province.
They said that despite rendering multiple sacrifices for the cause over the last six decades, they are still being discriminated against on the basis of language. They added that all six districts in Hazara are underdeveloped.
Furthermore, they said that even though Hazara has rich natural resources and has been contributing billions to the national and provincial exchequer, the population of 60 million has been facing a sense of alienation from the rulers sitting in Peshawar.
The first phase of the hunger strike will begin on February 3 and camps would be set up in Shuhada-e-Hazara Chowk Abbottabad. In the second phase, they announced that a shadow cabinet, with a governor, chief minister and cabinet members from Hazara, would be formed to manage all subsequent matters coupled with the launch of civil disobedience movement across Hazara.
Separately, activists of Sooba Hazara Tehrik chanted slogans during a protest outside the Parliament House in Islamabad on Wednesday.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 31st, 2013.
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@Stranger: ok, then let us turn each provincial division into a sooba and lets take start from the big provinces.
Their demands are justified. Smaller states based on community or language are easier to manage .
their demand is on linguistic grounds as the movement started after the renaming of the province as pakhtunkhwa. ethnically and linguistically their case for hazara province is very weak as pakhtuns are in majority. kohistan, battagram, most of mansehra and sigificant parts of haripur r pakhtuns. administratively, the slogan to which baba haider turned later on, there is no logic to carve out a couple of districts from the smallest province of pakistan, when bigger province like sind and baluchistan r ok being one. as regards the slogan of deprivation of hazara, chief ministers in the past have mostly ben from hazara, and the develpment projects which the current kp govt has undertaken in hazara are unprecedented. so this is wastage of time.