Ameer, Jamaat e Islami, Pakistan, Siraj-ul-Haq, has called upon the Election Commission to explain what measures it was taking to prevent the use of money in the upcoming Senate elections. He was talking to the media after filing his nomination papers for the Senate seat in Peshawar on Friday.
Siraj-ul-Haq said that the Senate elections had been made a trade and a game of the feudal lords, vaderas and capitalist. However, he said, it was the responsibility of the Election Commission to hold fair, free and transparent elections and to stop the use of money for purchasing votes.
Referring to the JIT report on the Baldia Town factory tragedy, Siraj-ul-Haq said this was the report of the country's most responsible agencies that had been field before the court, and it had clearly named the MQM for the factory fire, and had mentioned that the factory owner had been asked to pay Rs 200 million as extortion. He said that after the report, the eyes of the whole nation and the workers were at the government and the courts as the people were anxious to know if justice would be done to the families of the unfortunate victims of the tragedy.
Siraj-ul-Haq said it was surprising that the PPP talked much of the workers' rights but the PPP government in Sindh was bargaining with the MQM for the Senate elections instead of supporting the cause of the factory workers in this case. He said that terrorism, done in any name and by any organisation, racial, ethnic or sectarian, must be crushed.
Siraj-ul-Haq said that the JI could not tolerate a system wherein a poor vendor and labourer was dealt with an iron hand for a minor lapse, but the big wigs responsible for the destruction of major state institutions like WAPDA, Steel Mills, PIA, were saluted.
The JI chief deplored that the US President Obama, the champion of human rights and democracy, and the NGOs busy in the same propaganda, had not uttered a word on the murder of three Muslims by a terrorist at their own home, in a US state.