PESHAWAR - Awami National Party Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa President Ameer Haider Khan Hoti said on Sunday that the ANP would stage a sit-in outside Parliament House after Eid-ul-Fitr against the hours-long power outages in the province.

Hoti was talking to a delegation of Awami National Party (ANP). It is an injustice, Hoti said, that a province producing thousands of megawatts of cheaper electricity is subjected to prolonged load shedding.

He said that the ANP aimed to highlight the plight of Pakhtuns through the protest sit-in outside the Parliament House in Islamabad. He said that the miseries of the people of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), economical or social, were multiplying with each passing day but the federal government bothered the least about this unit of the federation, the ANP KP head said, adding that the differences between the current federal and provincial governments was also a reason behind the sufferings of the people of KP.

Hoti further said that the federal government had announced an election budget actually, which he said had nothing for the smaller federating units and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In the federal budget, no funds have been allocated for developing any electricity project in KP, he said, adding that the federal government also neglected the sick industry in the province and set aside no funds for its revival. He said that the federal government should shun its step-mother attitude with the people of KP.

Hoti alleged that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-led provincial coalition government had pushed Pakhtuns and the KP fifty years back, because the wheel of progress and uplift had not been moving ahead for the last four years. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and PTI chief Imran Khan are two faces of one coin, as they have no concerns with the province, which is visible from their acts and handling the KP, he said.

It was the ANP which staged a sit-in camp in front of the Parliament against the blockade of national identity cards of Pakhtuns and, similarly, it would again launch a massive protests drive soon after the Eid against hours’ long power break down in the province, he said.

He urged upon his party workers to get united, shun differences, and pass on the party’s message of peace to each nook and corner of the country. The ANP would launch a massive public mobilisation drive after Eid, he said, claiming that the party would make a clean sweep in coming polls in KP.

The poor performance on the part of both Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government at centre and PTI-led government at KP had disappointed people, Hoti said, adding that Pakhtuns are being punished for voting the PTI.

Hoti further said that the federal government had failed to launch any mega project in the province. Moreover, the present federal budget was Punjab-oriented budget, as other provinces had been ignored totally.

He asked the federal government to promote cordial relations with neighbouring Afghanistan. Both the countries had been badly affected by militancy, thus, to root out this menace, they must have brotherly relations, he said.