Mr. Philip is speaking Sindhi in Cardiff – U.K

Courtesy: Sindhi e-lists/ e-groups + YouTube

SPLGO a conspiracy to create rift between Urdu-Sindhi speaking Sindhis

SPLGO a conspiracy to create rift between Urdu, Sindhi people: JST

By PPI

KARACHI: Jeay Sindh Tehreek (JST) President Dr Safdar Sarki has termed the approval of the Sindh Peoples Local Government Ordinance (SPLGO) from Sindh Assembly a conspiracy to trigger discord between Urdu and Sindhi-speaking people.

Addressing a press conference at Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Tuesday, Sarki said that the Pakistan Peoples Party-Parliamentarian (PPP-P) and Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) – whom he called ‘traitors of Sindh’ – had created a province within a province with unequal distribution of powers between mayors of all five ‘metropolitans’, since the mayor of Karachi has been given extra powers.

He maintained that the people of Sindh will resist the SPLGO till its abrogation which he said believed has divided Sindh administratively. He called upon the Urdu-speaking Sindhis to raise their voice against the SPLGO, which he called a conspiracy to fan a civil war in the province.

Our request to our liberal urdu speaking brothers, sisters and friends to join hands with us in joint struggle against fascists

Comment by: Sahar Gul

We request our liberal Urdu speaking brothers, sisters and friends to come forward join hands with us and strongly condemn the attack on peaceful “Muhabbat-e-Sindh” Rally, leaving over a dozen peaceful protesters killed. With the support of our liberal urdu speaking brothers, sisters and friends we will narrow down the space gained by fascist terrorists.

Courtesy: Facebook

We will not allow betrayal of Sindh: Only ONE SINDH – there can be NO OTHER!

By: Dr. Ahmed H. Makhdoom & Khalid Hashmani

What is Sindhyat, my friends, my brothers and sisters, my sons and daughters? Sindhyat is when thee FIRST know thy “SAAEEN” – whatever you may call Him: “Allah, Ishwar, God, Waaheguru, Ahura-Mazda!”

Then – and ONLY THEN – thee must know thy Motherland, land of thy ancestors, land of thy forefathers – that great, grand and gregarious land is known as “SINDH!” And, there is only ONE SINDH – there can be NO OTHER!

Yes, this is VERY IMPORTANT – to know thy Creator ‘n thy Mother before thee go ‘n find anyone else!

And, the Sun emerges from the East, they go grazing out in the green fields and rich pastures – the herds of cows and buffalos of my Motherland, Sindh! And, when the same Sun hides itself in the West, they go back where they are most required and needed to their tranquil abodes to rest and quench the thirst of so many thirsty beings!

Saeen Ahmed Hussain Makhdoom urges us (overseas Sindhis) to go back to Sindh as Sindh needs their help. I echo Makhoom sahib’s words that Sindh needs help of everyone as some of its recently-born sons and daughters are betraying it by calling for its division (Balkanization of Pakistan/ Jinnahpur/ Mohajir Sooba/ Refugee province conspiracy). However, I believe that we Overseas Sindhis can help Sindh much more effectively from our new homelands provided we inspire ourselves and become active in protecting the integrity of Sindh.

Instead of getting ourselves in petty issues that are of no consequences, we should welcome cooperation and collaboration and form alliances on one single point that “we will not allow betrayal of Sindh“. Let us not waste our energy on putting each other down or focusing on differences but give all our attention to protect Sindhiat.

Courtesy: Sindhi e-lists/ e-groups, 20 May 2012.

The fascist terrorists want violence because their survival lies in it

By: Zulfi

We live in our Urdu speaking brothers dominated areas of Hyderabad for centuries and have very good connections and social relations with people of other linguistics and ethnic groups, especially with our urdu speaking brothers and sister – for the last couple of months I have been noticing a debate on the issue of new province in Sindh and an expected Sindhi-Urdu Speaking conflict. Most of the reports are coming from MQM related circles.

MQM has asked its people to get ready for any unexpected (which in fact is already planned by the fascist terrorists of MQM) fight with Sindhis, Balochs, Pakhtuns and other communities of Sindh.

Political parties working for Sindh interests should give as head to it issue.

Courtesy: Sindhi e-lists/ e-groups, May 13, 2012.

Postcard Campagin for 24 Hours Sindhi channel – Sindhis of India Demand a DD SINDHI channel from the govt. of India

Promoting Sindhi through Media , Demanding our Right, Send this letter to Prime Minister of India.

Post Card Campaign — a unique campaign for 24×7 Sindhi DD channel is launched and Sindhi-speaking people across the globe would send a post card to Prime Minister of India Demanding our Right. Keep postcards ready on Cheti Chand (Sindhi Thanks giving day), Get signatures from Sindhi and post to PM of India.

We Sindhis are a gifted community, always addicted to success in everything we do. This time let us put all our might to save our Sindhi language and culture. The language of the video clip is Sindhi.

Courtesy: Sindhi Sangat » Asha Chand

JST leader demands referendum on independence of Sindh

Dr Sarki wants referendum on independence of Sindh

KARACHI: Chief of Jiaye Sindh Tehreek (JST), Dr. Safdar Sarki addressing a rally in Karachi on Sunday called for holding a referendum on independence of Sindh, Geo News reported.

Addressing the workers and supporters of JST carrying red party flags here at Tibet Center, Dr. Sardki said Sindh suffered historic plunders and the resources of Sindhi nation their honour and national dignity had been delt a great blow.

“Through a pre-planned conspiracy people of other ethnicities were settled in Sindh,” he maintained, warning Sindhis and Balochs were speedily heading towards independence.

Sindh was put under slavery of Lahore through imposition of ‘one-unit’, adding ‘we reject slavery under Punjab, and now Punjab will have to accept Sindhi and Baloch movements’.

He said Punjab should co-exist as a good neighbour.

Sindh province, Dr Sarki continue, was turned into a desert through introduction of so-called amendments in the Constitution.

“The future of our Urdu-speaking Sindhi brothers does not lie with MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement), we will ensure protection to their rights,” he asserted.

However, he added that the followers of G.M. Syed had no issues with Urdu-speaking Sindhis.

Courtesy: The News

http://www.thenews.com.pk/article-40498-Dr-Sarki-wants-referendum-on-Sindh

Dr. Geet: Yankee doctor, speaking Sindhi, in the flood zone of Sindh

– Dr. Geet: Yankee doc, speaking Sindhi, in the flood zone

SINDH : KARACHI — Dr. Geet Chainani is the young American dream I hadn’t counted on meeting in Pakistan this summer. She’s a Yank born in India, raised in New York City, trained as a medical doctor in the Caribbean. And for most of a year now she’s been treating families, especially children, in the tent cities of the flood waters of the Indus River, upstream from Karachi. When we met, almost by chance, my first thought was: this is an American vision to be shared — of the trans-nation at its best, at home in the world, our useful hands-on gifts being shared, as if it came naturally.

Geet Chainani grew up on Staten Island with a grandmother who told her “we were Sindhis first.” Meaning: master the Sindhi language early; think of yourself as a child of the world’s first big-city culture, at Mohenjo-daro, from 2600 B.C. Her grandparents were part of the vast Hindu migration out of Sindh to India in 1947, at the partition that created Pakistan. But Sindh was where Geet came looking for her roots a year ago — for the tombs of the Sufi saints and the world’s oldest plumbing. The first big shock was Pakistan’s devastation by immersion. The second, when she pitched herself into the emergency, was discovering, with mothers in distress, that knowing their language was as valuable as her medical training.

All that in a woman who sounds to us, as I said, so New York. “I am very New York!” she laughed. “Being American is the ground for the work I do — the fundamental belief that all men are created equal. In the Preamble, you know… People say to me now: so you picked Sindh, and you’re saving these people. I’m, like: No. It [SINDH] picked me. And they’re saving me.”

Courtesy: → RadioOpenSource

The above news adopted from Sindhi e-lists/ e-groups, August 24, 2011.

Violence justified – by Gul Bukhari

Excerpt;

There is no quibble with the words used to condemn what Dr Mirza said. But to not condemn even more strongly, and separately, what the MQM activists did to the lives and livelihoods of innocent people across Sindh in response, is far more dangerous.

There is a strange undertone in editorials and commentary condemning Dr Zulfiqar Mirza’s racist remarks made on July 13 against the Urdu-speaking community of Karachi.

Pick up any recent comment on Mirza’s outburst and you will notice he is being criticised not for the views or prejudices he aired per se, but for being ultimately responsible for setting the city of Karachi ablaze on that day. More than a dozen innocent lives were lost and much property was destroyed — the city was in the grip of fear again. …

….. Take, for example, the most common explanation offered in Governor Taseer’s defence: that he did not actually blaspheme and that therefore his killer, Mumtaz Qadri, should not have been offended in the first place. This is a sorry apology by those who lack the courage to say outright that any kind of insult, whatsoever, does not justify physical violence or punishment.

Even if Governor Taseer had blasphemed (for argument’s sake only), and hurt people’s religious feelings, there was no justification for his killing. Even if Dr Mirza had hurt ethnic feelings, there could be no justification for killing innocents.

And this recognition is largely missing from national commentary and discourse on the Mirza episode. It is a frightening sign of how this society submits to violence.

To read complete article → Daily Times

Violence in Karachi exposes deep divides

By Karin Brulliard

SINDH: KARACHI, Pakistan — A trash-strewn dusty street here became a front line in recent ethnic battles that killed 100 people in four days.

Now, in the aftermath, residents speak of the street as though it is a chasm, dividing the population of this oceanside city of 18 million and even Pakistan itself.

On one side, people known as Mohajirs, long the dominant group in this economic hub, seethingly point to bullet-scarred and burned houses and demand a new province that would be theirs alone. On the other side, Pashtuns who migrated here in recent years after fleeing an Islamist insurgency in their native northwest also point to bullet holes, and some express worry that a sort of ethnic cleansing is to come.

“Now they are asking for their own province,” Adnan Khan, a Pashtun whose brother was fatally shot by unknown assailants this month, said of the Mohajirs. “Next maybe they will ask for their own country.”

Karachi, Pakistan’s most diverse city, is once more spewing violence that goes unchecked by police and is stoked by thuggish politicians. While the fierce Taliban insurgency seeks to overthrow the government from mountain hideouts hundreds of miles away, the city’s battles are laying bare the deep ethnic, political and sectarian cleavages that pose an additional threat to this fragile federation — as well as an impediment to its unity against Islamist militancy.

When Pakistan parted from India in 1947, it fused vast spans of ethnically and linguistically distinct populations under the common cause of Islam. But the state has struggled to define Islam’s role as a social adhesive. The powerful, Punjabi-dominated military, meanwhile, has aimed to suppress various nationalist movements, even while sometimes backing ethnic and sectarian groups as tools for influence. Politics remain cutthroat and largely localized. The result, some say, is a nation hobbled — and increasingly bloodied — by factionalism.

“Why are they fighting in Karachi? Because they have not become Pakistani yet. People have not become a nation,” said Syed Jalal Mahmood Shah, the Karachi-based leader of a small nationalist party that represents people native to surrounding Sindh province. Mohajirs, like Pashtuns, are themselves migrants to Karachi: They are Urdu-speaking Muslims who fled Hindu-majority India at partition.

Escalating clashes

Shifting demographics are the root of the fighting in Karachi, where an influx of ethnic Pashtuns from the war-torn region along the Afghan border is challenging the Mohajirs’ long-standing grip on the city. The struggle is waged through assassinations, land-grabbing and extortion, and it is carried out by gangs widely described as armed wings of ethnically based political parties. The Urdu speakers, represented by the dominant Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, accuse the Pashtuns of sheltering terrorists in Karachi; the MQM’s main rival, the Awami National Party, or ANP, says the city’s 4 million Pashtuns are ignored politically. But the violence is escalating to new levels, and residents say ethnic tensions are sharpening.

Courtesy: → Washington Post

Zulifqar Mirza versus MQM case (I)

by Dr. Manzur Ejaz

First of all let me state a disqualifier: All Urdu Speaking are not associated with MQM or religious parties of this ethnic group. The very fact that PPP candidates give a hard time to non-PPP/religious/ethnic politicians show that a large section of Urdu speaking population is progressive, forward looking and identifies itself with other Pakistani people. Great Urdu speaking intellectuals have done a lot for mother tongues and enlightenment of the country. Therefore, Urdu speaking term is generically used in the narrative below for the ones who associate themselves with MQM or UP religious parties. It is a chauvinistic mindset that we are analyzing not a community which is as diverse as Punjabi, Sindhi or other Pakistanis.

************

MQM has made a lot of hoopla against Zulifqar Mirza’s statement in which he indicated that:

(i) MQM, led by Altaf, is more criminal than its nemesis Afaq Ahmed against whom no criminal case has been proved in the court. On the contrary, many cases are proved and guilty punished by courts belonging to Altaf group. Altaf has caused more mothers to lose their sons than Afaq, claims Mr. Mirza.

(ii) MQM’s dream of creating a separate province of Karachi-Hyderabad can only materialize on the Sindhis’ dead body. Sindh provide food and shelter to migrant Urdu speaking and will never give them a right to cut it from Sindh.

(iii) Afaq of MQM (Haqiqi) is a political prisoner not a criminal that Altaf wants us to believe.

After scaring the PPP government and other ‘for-rent’ politicians of Punjab, Altaf has called off the protests. He believes he has successfully pushed the truth under carpet that Mirza told the world. However, in doing so, Altaf has taken a familiar position that Mirza has maligned the ‘Pakistan founders.” In other words Urdu speaking Muhajirs are the only founders of Pakistan. In a way he is right and Pakistan’s ongoing mess is created by its acclaimed founders that Altaf is talking about.

Dedicated to Shaheed Shahbaz Bhatti

The legislator, MNA, Asiya Nasir, elected on a reserved women’s seat from Balochistan, the only minority female legislator in the Federal Assembly and speaking the day after the murder Shahbaz Bhatti. She holds a Masters in English literature from the Government Girls College, Quetta and a certificate in Teachers’ Training and is a member of the NGO Aurat Foundation. She has been a member of the House since 2002 when she was elected on a reserved seat for minorities.

MNA, Asiya Nasir protesting in the Federal Assembly against the brutal assassination of federal minister “Shahbaz Bhatti”. She is speaking harsh but truth. No one is a superior creature than other human beings. God, Allah, Jesus, Bhagwan, what ever has created human all are alike without any discrimination. If any one believes in God, he should respect and treat every human equally.

Pakistani Christians didn’t come from outside, they always lived here… Christianity came… Just like Islam came… in the same way Hindus were always here and Sikhs started their religion in 17-18th century.

Basically she is saying Pakistan is sinking!!! She was condemning the death of Shahbaz Bhatti, the minorities minister who has been assassinated by terrorists in Pakistan. She said her daughter even wants to leave this country but she has told her that this is our motherland, and they will always remain here no matter what. She is sickened by terrorism in Pakistan. …

– You Tube

Why not be willing to talk to MQM to create a win-win solution?

by Khalid Hashmani

Washington : The question as to why some Sindhis are not willing to engage in negotiations with MQM to create a win-win solution for the benefit of all those who live in Sindh was raised. One opinion expressed in the discussion said that to achieve Sindh Rights, Sindhi-speaking Sindhis should formulate a joint alliance with Urdu-speaking Sindhis and other non-Sindhi speaking Sindhi populations but that MQM would not be a fair-minded and trust-worthy partner as it has so many faces. MQM has a suspicious record in dealing with that oppose MQM hegemony and as well as other communities living in Sindh. It is imperative that Sindhis protect and work together with all those who live in Sindh in peace and oppose those who practice and promote violence. The other point of view was that a majority of Urdu-speaking Sindhis have elected MQM to be their representative. Sindhis cannot and shoud not choose the adversaries with whom they wish to talk and with whom they do not wish to talk. Another argument made was that MQM wins elections mainly through manoeuvring and by threatening common Urdu-speaking men and women was countered that some also say that among Sindhis, elections are mainly won by large landlords and using non-visible coercing techniques. Does this mean that other parties refuse to accept PPP as a representative of Sindhis?

In concluding part of the discussion, the consensus appeared to be that when MQM demonstratively shows that it has shunned violence, Sindhis should have no hesitation in working with MQM in order to solve the problems of Sindh. It was hoped that MQM will soon get rid of all their arms and ammunition, and genuinely adapt a path of peace, tolerance, harmony and non-violence.

– About Author: Mr. Khalid Hashmani is a Washington DC-based veteran human rights activist. He is the founding President of Sindhi Association of North America (SANA) and Chief coordinator of Sindhi Excellence Team (SET) that participates in advocacy activities on behalf of  Sindhis.