KARACHI: Pir Pagara PML-Funct­ional chief and head of the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) said that they were given two seats as “charity”, which they did not want to keep.

In a presser held following a GDA huddle in Karachi on Monday, the spiritual leader of the Hur Jamaat announced a sit-in to protest this injustice at the Hyderabad Bypass on Feb 16. He said the GDA would also contact other political parties to join the sit-in.

He disclosed that someone close to him had advised him to dissolve GDA and participate in the election under the PML-F banner. “I was told that if I form an alliance with Asif Zardari, I will get my national and Sindh Assemblies seats,” he added.

He said he was told that there will be ‘zero’ result in case he did not close the chapter of GDA.

“If the entire province was to be handed over to [Asif Ali] Zardari, then what was the need for an election?” he asked, adding: “We also return these two seats. Give these seats also to Zardari, he needs them”.

The PML-F chief said that his father had always supported the army. “He [late Pir Pagara] was with the GHQ since 1954 and always advised us to go with the army. But we have the right to protest when and where we do not get respect and justice.”

When asked if the country’s establishment would be angered by his protest, Pir Pagara said that when a son was angry with his father, he also left the house.

The JUI “forfeited” one of its two Sindh Assembly seats, on the pretext that it was actually won by the PTI-backed independent candidate, but Hafiz Naeemur Rehman was declared the winner only to defuse the pressure of their resistance and protest.

The party said it didn’t need “charity” and would keep resisting and exercising every legal right to win back its mandate in Karachi, where it claimed MQM-P was “imposed” through “manipulated and rigged results”.

“We don’t want a single vote which is not ours and we won’t give up a single one which was ours,” Hafiz Naeem told a press conference at the party’s Karachi headquarters.

“In PS-129, we came to know that after a total count of the votes as per the Form 45 of all the polling stations, I bagged 30,464 votes, while the votes of the independent candidate of PTI were higher than mine. But look at the tragedy that the MQM candidate, who wasn’t even in the race and received only 6,010 votes, was declared winner.”