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| July 11, 2005 | Monday | Jumadi-us-Sani 3, 1426 |
MMA under attack from all sides: Hasba Bill
ISLAMABAD, July 10: The Hasba Bill being tabled in the NWFP Assembly on Monday by the MMA government is against the Constitution, violates the fundamental human rights, is a recipe to polarise the society and a blatant attempt at talibanisation that will push the people back into the dark ages in the name of Islam.
Senator Farhatullah Babar, spokesman for Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) said this in a statement here on Sunday.
Senator Babar said the PPP had condemned the bill and urged the human rights bodies and civil society to thwart this naked bid to rob them of their rights guaranteed in the Constitution.
The bill allows the provincial government to set up a chain of offices of religious ombudsmen in the province at the provincial, district and tehsil levels and raise a brigade of new Hasba police to impose a partisan world view on the citizens in the name of “propagation of virtue and preventing the vice” (Amr bil-maroof wa nahin anil munkar).
He said the bill was aimed at doling out judicial jobs in grade 18 to 20 to madrassah graduates on the one hand and befooling the people on the eve of local bodies on the other.
The PPP spokesman warned against the implication of allowing the Pakistani Taliban to regulate the private lives of citizens in the name of enforcing “Islamic value system”. “Spending of hundreds of millions on these new institutions amounts to foisting mediaeval nonsense at public expense,” he said.
The armed forces will not be questioned but under Section 2 (2) the secretariat of the elected provincial assembly can be summoned and questioned by the mohtasib, he said, adding “there appears to be some collusion to undermine the elected representatives”.
The PPP senator said the religious parties in collusion with the undemocratic forces first undermined parliament through the 17th Amendment and now another assault on parliament had been mounted through the Hasba Bill.
He said the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) had declared in September last that Hasba Bill clashed with the Constitution and “will not achieve the purposes of Shariah and instead raise controversies over the teachings of Quran and Sunnah”.
PML: Pakistan Muslim League (PML) Central Vice-President and Minister of State for Culture Mohammad Ali Durrani has said enactment of Hasba Act in the NWFP will be tantamount to suspending the 1973 Constitution.
He was speaking at a press conference held at the PML House here on Sunday.
Mr Durrani said the MMA also violated its own manifesto by sticking to the passage of Hasba Bill, as the religious alliance had pledged that it would formulate a legislation in accordance with the Constitution.
He said the MMA had earmarked Rs300 million for the establishment of Hasba as institution, while appointment of one or two ombudsmen in 24 districts and nearly 48 tehsils would require a bulky amount of Rs1 billion.
Wasti: PML Vice-President Syed Kabir Ali Wasti said the Hasba Bill is “designed to impose the MMA’s interpretation of Islam”, writes our reporter from Rawalpindi.
In a statement issued here on Sunday, the ruling party leader urged President Pervez Musharraf to prevent the MMA government from introducing the bill “in the larger national interest” and save the country from “a destructive course being pursued by the religious grouping”.
APMA: All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) on Sunday rejected the Hasba Bill being presented by Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) in the NWFP Assembly and announced a countrywide movement against the proposed act.
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