THATTA, Dec 20: A five-member fact-finding committee, including four councillors and a journalist, entrusted by the Thatta District Government to investigate the controversial issue of the birth place of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah claimed to have gathered ample proof to be presented in the next session of the district council that the Quaid was born in Jherruck and not in Karachi.

This was revealed by Dr Barkat Khwaja and Moti Miranpuri, members of the committee-cum-councillors, and Dr Mumtaz Ahmed Uqaili — a journalist — while talking to Dawn on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Sadique Hussain Khwaja, head of the Quaid-i-Azam Yadgar Committee, Jherruck, told this scribe that the committee had collected concrete documentary evidence regarding it.

Known academician, a former vice chancellor and author of several books, Dr Ghulam Ali Allana, told this correspondent that former Sindh minister for education, Pyar Ali Allana, had summoned him in his capacity as chairman curriculum committee and then the director, Bureau of Curriculum, served him a notice for publishing Jherruck as the birthplace of the Quaid-i-Azam in a Class IV text book.

Mr Allana said that he and the then director of curriculum, Apa Shams Abbasi, had provided him with proof.

They had also pointed out that the text book of Class V, published under the supervision of Dr Umer Bin M. Daudpota in 1955 had also shown the Quaid’s birthplace as Jherruck, a hilly-tract village in Thatta. The Wazir Mansion (Karachi) in which the Quaid was said to have been born in 1886 did not exist then.

Dr. G.A. Allana said that Pyar Ali Allana’s grandfather, Seth Karim Qasim, was the first cousin of Mr Jinnah.

The committee will also take note of the findings of a past committee comprising officials of the Sindh Text Book Board — Habibullah Siddiqui, Imdad Hussaini, Abdul Ghaffar Siddiqui and Maulana Abdullah Gandhro — who were nominated as the inquiry committee members by the then chief minister of Sindh, Syed Abdullah Shah, as well as the facts collected by the then commissioner, Hyderabad division, Nisar Ahmed Siddiqui, under the directives of the then governor, Sindh, Kamaluddin Azfar, who had visited the birth place of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah in Jherruck on Aug 10, 1996.

The committee, Dr Barkat said, would also meet Dr Abdul Wahid Soomro, the then PPP MPA, who had moved the Sindh Assembly for correcting the facts about Mr Jinnah’s birthplace.

Dr Samiuddin Haider, a medical officer, whose ancestors were residing in Jherruck during the year of Mr Jinnah’s birth, and later his father, a doctor who graduated from the Darbangah Medical College Bihar, who also served in Jherruck in the days when Dr A. P. R. Pinto, first civil surgeon of Thatta, have also provided supporting documents on the issue, Dr Barkat added.

It has been learnt that the first alma mater of the Quaid-i-Azam, the first Sindhi primary school in Jherruck was established in 1873.

It is claimed that the original muster roll register containing the name Mohammed Ali Jinnah Poonja as student was taken away by a committee constituted by the then prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in connection with fact-finding but never returned.