Caretaker Interior Minister Safraz Bugti has said that he was willing to talk to BNP-M leader Sardar Akhtar Mengal, who staged a sit-in in front of Parliament House in Islamabad on Monday for the recovery of missing persons.

“We should have gone today to meet them but there was a cabinet meeting and the Senate session,” he said in an interview with Asma Shirazi on her show Faisla Aap Ka which was aired on Aaj News on Monday.

Some politicians and people from the civil society had joined the sit-in. Mengal has claimed that the government over the years has failed to resolve the issue that he thinks has affected many families.

When asked, Bugti replied that the right to assemble and protest was allowed under the Constitution, and the sit-in on the missing persons’ issue demanded “objective debate”. He explained the aforementioned issue was a “dicey” subject and there were also reports of “self-disappearance”.

Parliaments are appropriate fora to resolve those issues, he said and added that the same platforms were used for past issues.

Mengal, who has been part of the government in the past, should have used Parliament to raise the issue, Bugti said and added that the BNP-M chief could present the protest as an election campaign or propaganda.

The interior minister added that the accusations have no “authenticity” while responding to the allegations of Mengal that the government was supporting the other party on the land dispute in Wadh.

“The law says you cannot suddenly depose someone if they were on a land for 10 to 12 years,” he said and wondered how the “state was patronising” the other party in the dispute when all the administrative positions were apparently filled by Mengal in the area over the past five years.

He was of the view that Parliament has to make laws for counter-insurgency so that the issue is resolved once and for all. “It has to be seen who started this fight whether the state or those terrorist groups whose men are missing. We have to think who the legitimate voices of terrorist groups in parliament are.”

Illegal immigrants’ repatriation

Bugti said that the government has made coordination committees and holding centres for illegal immigrants where they would be given food and medicine and within a day they would be repatriated or deported.

He shunned the possibility that there would be any resistance from the immigrants in Sindh. Moreover, the interior minister doesn’t see the development impacting elections.

“We are encouraging legal entry or anyone who needs asylum. So if someone has an issue a state mechanism is running back of mind and a sympathetic view is there for vulnerable people. Those who are illegal we will show them the legal way.”