KARACHI: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan on Thursday rejected the digital census results and warned of protest if the true count of population did not reflect in the finalresults of the process. It put questions before the state and its institutions about their silence over the `exploitation of urban Sindh time and again`.

Addressing a press conference at the party`s temporary headquarters in Bahadurabad, MQM-P leaders took a strong position on the recently concluded enumeration process and made it clear to its allies in the federal government that the feared results of the count would leave no option for the partybutto stage protests.Senior party leader Syed Mustafa Kamal came up with detailed data, showing `flawed` mechanism of census designed by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics and argued with numbers on how the country`s largest city and business capital was lagging behind in population growth as compared to even ruraldistricts ofthe province.

`How amazing is it that in a block in Shaheed Benazirabad, a block carries 270 houses and in Hyderabad there are 200,` he said. `And Karachi the big-gest, richest and most diversified city of the country has only 198 houses. Is this a kind of joke? It didn`t end even here.

Larkana has more than 250 houses in a block. So the census mechanism tells us that Larkana, Shaheed Benazirabad and other Sindh cities are more populated than Karachi and their pace of population has grown much higher than this city during the last five years, he added.

He claimed that it was a documented fact that more than800,000 households were not counted in Karachi census and thousands in Hyderabad. Mr Kamal referred to another documented fact which suggested that in Larakana, household structures had grown by 31pc over the years and in Karachi, it increased only by 13pc while the same pace in Hyderabad was counted at 5pc.

`We aren`t here for any discrimination or to spread hatred,` he said. `We are here to counter the hatred which is being done through unjust population count. We are not here to demand that you curtail the population number of certain community and increase the number of certain others. We are here only to demand a true, honest and factual population count. We have been raising our voice in the parliament, knocking at the doors those at the helm of affairs and making appeals through media. But let me say that, unfortunately, this has been in vain so far as nobody is paying heed, he concluded.

Farooq Sattar, accusing Pakistan Peoples Party of being a key player behind this `flawed` census, claimed that since 1972, the ruling party of Sindh had never let a fair census for urban Sindh take place. The census mechanism, he said, was designed on ill-intentions which resulted in this mess, creating more controversies than giving solutions.

`And make one thing very clear. The population of Karachi is more than double of what is being shown in this census.