PESHAWAR: Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) has announced to hold an all-party conference at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa level on August 29, at Al-Markaz-e-Islami Peshawar to devise an effective strategy to raise collective voice for the rights of the merged districts.
Tehreek-e-Haqooq-e-Qibail chairman Shah Faisal Afridi told media persons that provincial leaders of all parties would be invited to the proposed conference so that they could also share their views about the plight of the tribal people.
Jamaat-i-Islami District Secretary General Sultan Akbar Afridi and Jamaat-e-Islami Tehsil Bara Ameer Khan Wali Afridi also shared views on the occasion and talked about the rights of the tribal people.
Shah Faisal Afridi, who is also a leader of JI in Khyber district, said that the federal government promised to the people of tribal districts, but those promises have not been fulfilled till date. He demanded that tribal districts were promised Rs 100 billion annually and Rs 1000 billion in 10 years, but nothing has been received yet.
Likewise, he said the law and order situation in tribal districts was going from bad to worse with each passing day but the government was not taking appropriate steps to restore peace in the region and as result the people were feeling themselves totally insecure.
The tribesman said that the merged districts also had the same rights to national resources as other provinces, so the announced 3 percent share of NFC award should be provided at the earliest. He demanded that the number of seats in the National Assembly and Provincial Assembly should be increased from 16 to 24 while respecting the tribal peoples’’ right to vote.
He also demanded that the tribal population in the recent census had been counted less than the actual population, which was discriminatory, so the tribal population should be properly counted on the basis of the permanent address of their computerized national identity cards.
He said that the district organizations of political parties had already been taken on board to raise voice for rights of the people and now the political parties would be taken into confidence at the provincial level. He said that despite the objections, the tribal districts were merged; now they should also get their rights. “We had struggled for the merger of the former Fata (federally administered tribal areas) and the same efforts would be made now for rights of the area,” he vowed.
In response to a question, he said that in the census, the votes of those who have not been present in their area for six months have not been counted.
There are thousands of people who are abroad or outside their district and their rights are being lost. We have demanded that this be rectified.
Afridi said that the future course of action in this regard would be decided later. He said the situation was alarming and they (local people) could not sit silent as spectators.
He also talked about the natural resources in different merged districts and urged the government to spend on development whatever resources were recovered from the respective localities.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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