KARACHI: The All Karachi Chootia Students’ Union (AKCSU) on Saturday raised serious concern against a social networking site blocking the accounts of thousands of Chootia community subscribers believing the accounts to be fake and fabricated. The Chootias, are a community in Karachi while the word is a commonly-used derogatory term in Urdu.

Addressing a press conferrence in Karachi, AKCSU  general secretary Rizwan Chootia said: “‘Facebook has blocked the accounts of all the subscribers belonging to the Chootia community of Karachi thinking the names are false and fabricated. For Chootia  being an abusive word in the Urdu language, Facebook authorities thought that the account holders are fake and fabricated. But, they are still unknown to the fact that Chootia is an ethnic tribe of Karachi which has a rich historical background in the state history.”

The students’ organization also decided to burn an effigy of the social networking site on the II Chundrigar Road on Monday and demanded public apology from the social networking website for their action.

”We are very unhappy with authority as they have even failed to verify the matter seriously before taking a step like blocking thousands of our accounts. We think it may be a deep-rooted conspiracy against our community and so we warn them to abstain from such acts in the future. They even failed to verify the truth when they blocked the accounts of some prominent personalities and popular artists like Riaz Chootia, who belongs to our community. We protested this negligence and demanded them to reactivate our accounts immediately,'” he said. He added that there is also some other condemnable instance in the state where the word Chootia is being used as a slang word.

The organization has announced they will stage a sit in demonstration to pressure the government to fulfill their 26-point charter of demands. ”We have decided to stage a sit in protest on March 15 to push our 26-point charter of demands that includes tribal status and reservation for the Chootia community in educational institutions and preservation of historic monuments of the Chootia dynasty. CT