ISLAMABAD: As moves for a political remedy to Karachis violence gathered support in the National Assembly on Wednesday, the MQM talked tough with threats to take its own course for its `defence.
Pakistan Muslim League-N demanded that the government call top security officials to be quizzed about recurring waves of killings in the countrys economic hub.
PML-N deputy secretary-general Ahsan Iqbal, who said he was making the proposal on behalf of his party, said the heads of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the Military Intelligence, Sindh province police, paramilitary Rangers and Special Branch as well as the provincial chief minister should be summoned to a special sitting of the house on Thursday or, if it were not possible, a day later to explain the causes of the violence and identify people responsible it.
We are spending millions and billions of rupees on these security organisations, and if they cant tell us about this, or identify any hand stopping them (from maintaining law and order), then there is no need for their existence and we should instead set up new institutions, he said, adding: Now business as usual is not an option.
However, the PML-Ns senior figure and senior vice-president Makhdoom Javed Hashmi suggested that the countrys entire political leadership sit together in a national commission to find a solution to Karachis problems and give it an authority befitting the size of the city, which he said nobody should try to monopolise.
Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour of the Awami National Party called Karachi a city of all communities of the country and said dialogue, rather than guns, should settle any conflict of interests. He also suggested handing over Karachi for a month to army to `deweaponise the city.
Two Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) members who spoke on the day seemed upset most by what they saw as support of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), or some of its important figures, to the Karachi-based partys breakaway rival group Mohajir Qaumi Movement-Haqiqi, commonly known as just Haqiqi, and others blamed for the so-called target killing of MQM followers.
Opening the third day of a debate that the house decided to continue until Friday, MQMs Syed Asif Hasnain alleged `genocide in Karachi and a conspiracy to break up the country with the involvement of unspecified important government personalities and warned the house that in such a situation, you should not complain if a call to defend Karachi is given to us by party leader Altaf Hussain.
But more ominous was a speech by another MQM member, Abdul Qadir Khanzada, who said residents of his Orangi Town constituency were asking for freedom to defend themselves because police or Rangers would not help them and that they had the `experience that would enable to defend not only themselves but whole of Karachi and bury conspiratorial elements.
A PPP member from Karachi, Sher Mohammad Baloch, recalled what then had been much deadlier violence in Karachi after the formation of the original Mohajir Qaumi Movement later named as Muttahida Qaumi Movement and called recognition of the Haqiqi as a `reality and holding a joint public meeting in the city where heads of all parties appeal to people to shun violence and terrorism or face action by authorities.
A member of Pakistan Muslim League-Q from Sindh, Kishen Chand Parwani, complained of kidnappings and of target killings of members of the Hindu community in the interior of his province mainly aimed to grab their properties and called for the formation of a minorities commission headed by minorities affairs minister and including the federal interior secretary and provincial chief secretaries.
Former religious affairs minister Hamid Saeed Kazmi, who was refused bail by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, in a case of alleged corruption in last years accommodation arrangements for Pakistani pilgrims, said he was being ground between two millstones for unproven charges, though Speaker Fehmida Mirza stopped him from going into details because the case was before a court.