JI activists hold sit-in

Jamaat-i-Islami demand fresh elections across the city.

KARACHI:

The election day rigging forced the activists of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) to hold a sit-in in Saddar which continued late into the night.

Soon after party leaders addressed the media at the press club, they led their supporters to march up to the Supreme Court Karachi registry. They found their way blocked by containers placed right across the National Academy of Performing Arts building. The leaders announced that they will sit-in at the same spot and stayed there till late in the evening. They also held Maghrib prayers on the road and were later joined by several hundred more people.

The home department had imposed Section-144 banning public gatherings, but the protesters defied the ban and stayed at the site. Several JI supporters from PECHS joined the protesters on Sharae Faisal. Earlier, JI leaders held a press conference in which they demanded fresh elections across Karachi. They called the elections a complete failure of the election commission.

“The JI will approach the Supreme Court to bring back people’s confidence so that they would know how and why the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) was allowed to hijack the people’s mandate,” claimed JI Karachi chief Muhammad Hussain Mehanti, addressing a crowded press conference along with the party leadership.

“The voters want to know how a candidate could possibly secure 170,000 votes within 10 hours,” he said. “They also want to know about the election commission’s impartiality in declaring the results when polling agents were thrown out of the polling stations on gunpoint.”

He reminded everyone that several political parties had demanded army deployment inside the polling stations but the election commission paid no heed. “The election commission should now have some shame and it should stop announcing the Karachi-related results when the Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G Ebrahim has openly admitted his failure to hold free and fair elections in the city.”

He said that re-election in Karachi was not only JI’s demand but the voice of every stakeholder in Karachi.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2013.