Temporizing yet again

As one of his major public engagements after becoming interim prime minister, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain has chosen to speak at a convention of ulema and mashaikh. This is tricky territory, not least because the temptation is to pander to the audience.

Chaudhry Shujaat has done exactly that. He has promised, among other things, that amendments in the Hudood laws have been or will be referred to the Council of Islamic Ideology and presented to the cabinet after vetting by ulema.

Even the ban on the use of loudspeakers for purposes other than azaan will also be finalized in consultation with religious leaders and scholars. The prime minister said the government would continue to seek guidance from them to formulate a comprehensive strategy to deal with the challenges confronting Muslims.

He ominously said a law against those "levelling baseless allegations and making false claims" needed to be framed, and the government required the help of religious scholars in drafting such a law.

He gave a clean chit to madressahs, saying that as a previous interior minister, he knew well that no religious seminary was ever found involved in any act of terrorism in the country.

Chaudhry Shujaat was interior minister in the first Sharif government in 1990. The climate then was different from what it is now, and the government of his current boss, General Pervez Musharraf, would not have sought to regulate madressahs and banned many religious organizations if it did not have evidence of their involvement in activities prejudicial to peace and sectarian harmony.

It is not direct, conclusive involvement that has been under debate in this context: it is the mindset that such institutions promote that has been implicated in lending us our reputation as a breeding ground for militancy and extremism.

On the Hudood laws also, there is now a fair degree of national consensus and informed opinion - religious, legal, secular and political - that these need to be repealed or drastically amended.

The National Commission on the Status of Women, set up by the government in 1999, had submitted its report last year. It said that of 15 of the commission's members who actively participated in deliberations regarding the Hudood ordinances, 12 recommended that these should be repealed, and only two suggested the laws be amended.

The two represented, respectively, the Council of Islamic Ideology, to which recourse is again proposed to be taken, and the MMA, which is in many ways an ally of the government but which continues to act as a pressure group on behalf of the religio-political lobby to prevent the government from carrying out any meaningful social reforms.

These are the facts, coldly stated. There is no gainsaying that, under the Constitution, we are an Islamic state, and that all laws have to be in conformity with Islam.

The problem is that this - along with profuse references to tribal customs and Islamic traditions - is being selectively used to block societal reforms while much else that is mean, hypocritical and unlawful in politics and other fields goes unchecked.

If the government seeks to employ the stratagem of taking religious leaders along on measures that it believes are necessary for reformation, then that is one thing. But the trouble is that such mollification of ulema and mashaikh in the past has backfired, and landed us in an unholy mess all round.

Second, this tactic would make sense if it were felt that the government on its part at least was convinced of the need for reforms in the Hudood and other laws. The history of the past four years of prevarication does not suggest that the government is so convinced. The strong suspicion is that whatever Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain says is only further temporizing this question of reform.

An ill-advised move

A piece of sensible legislation is soon to fall victim to political expediency. As announced by two PML officials at a press conference in Islamabad on Sunday, the Political Parties Order, 2002, is to be amended to allow a person to hold both party and government offices at the same time.

This goes against the norms of parliamentary democracy, which prohibits government leaders from holding party offices. The idea is that the party should guide the government without becoming an organic part of it.

Whenever the government deviates from party guidelines, the party should take it to task. The party thus retains a watchful eye and never lets the prime minister flout party policies or discipline. However, the practice in Pakistan has been the other way round.

The prime minister becomes too powerful because he heads both the government and the ruling party. This way he feels responsible to no one. Not only that, the prime minister so manipulates the party as to fill key offices with lackeys and turncoats.

The party thus becomes the prime minister's handmaiden instead of being the guide and account-taker. This also serves to strengthen autocratic tendencies in the prime minister and denies the party a meaningful role in politics.

The proposed amendment is now intended to formalize an aberration. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain became chief of the united PML on May 12, and it did not occur to anyone then that he would be called upon to become prime minister in a couple of months.

The PPO is, therefore, to be amended for the benefit of one man and the oligarchy that rules Pakistan. This itself is a sad commentary on the value we attach to legislation.

It does not occur to the powers that be that laws are made for the benefit of society, but here is a law being amended only to legalize an unhealthy practice - and to sanctify an expedient interim arrangement.

Park with a proper name

There years have passed since President Musharraf, while on a visit to Karachi, had promised to build a public park at a site having the odd name of 'Gutter Baghicha'.

True to its name, the place is more of a gutter than a 'baghicha' owing to heaps of garbage dumped there and sewage water that has left it with a permanent foul smell. The city government has only paid lip service to cleaning up the 430-acre plot in the old part of the city and developing a park there.

Funds amounting to one million rupees for the purpose lapsed last year because of relevant authorities' inaction. The Karachi nazim has presided over yet another ritual meeting to discuss plans for a park at the site but the city government does not seem to have an appropriate name for the planned park in mind - 'gutter' and 'baghicha' are contradictory terms, after all.

Located in Karachi's old, congested part, the site has been systematically subjected to environmental degradation over the decades. Until the early post-independence years, vegetables used to be grown there for the city's consumption.

As the rush of immigrants mounted, the area around the Baghicha began to get commercialized. Today, the entire locality has been overtaken by land-grabbers who have built small factories, warehouses and commercial plazas, leaving little open space for recreation.

On the site itself, there are illegal hydrants and processing plants, the latter dealing mostly in hazardous chemicals. The city district government needs to come down hard on such illegal activities in a densely populated area. Also, it is time it had an action plan, complete with deadlines, so that work on the development of a park can begin in right earnest.