MQM-P has taken its campaign for new administrative units to the streets of Karachi (Express Tribune).
The rally
From Karimabad to Mazar-e-Quaid on Sunday.
What its leaders said
Chairman Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui: “Our demands are echoing across the country, and the demand for administrative units is also being discussed nationwide.”
Former Karachi mayor and senior leader Dr Farooq Sattar said “18 years of patience had ended”, and that people across Sindh had mobilised for their rights.
Nasreen Jalil and Wasim Akhtar also took part.
The framing being used
Administrative rather than linguistic grounds — units justified by governance and service delivery rather than ethnicity.
That distinction is doing deliberate work. The objection to new provinces in Sindh has always been that carving out Karachi would split the province along a Mohajir-Sindhi line. Describing the demand as administrative is an attempt to answer that objection without conceding it.
Where it is going
Sattar said the party would take its case to Larkana, Sukkur, Nawabshah, Mirpurkhas and Hyderabad — interior Sindh cities where the PPP is strongest and where the argument is least likely to be received well. No dates were given.
What stands against it
The Sindh Assembly passed a resolution rejecting any division of the province and transmitted it to the President, the Prime Minister and both houses — a session MQM-P and Jamaat-i-Islami walked out of. Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah said on 11 September that altering boundaries without a province’s consent would be “unconstitutional and unacceptable”.
Under Article 239(4), altering a province’s limits requires a two-thirds majority of that province’s own assembly. MQM-P does not have the numbers, and a street campaign does not change that arithmetic.
What is not established
No rally dates have been announced for the interior Sindh cities. The PPP had not responded to Sunday’s rally at the time of writing, and no bill or resolution on administrative units has been tabled anywhere.
[Image: Express Photo via The Express Tribune]
