LAHORE, Dec 27: Opposition leader in the National Assembly and MMA secretary-general Maulana Fazlur Rahman says seminaries’ management will prefer to court arrest instead of handing over foreign students to police. The deadline for expelling the students is Dec 31 and the government has not yet extended it despite talks on the issue with the managements of seminaries.
The Maulana, who is also president of his own faction of the JUI which runs several seminaries, announced that ulema would not inform their respective area’s police while moving out of the station.
He was speaking at a press conference here on Tuesday.
“We’ll do our best to keep the students with us and shall prefer arrest over giving the foreigners to police,” he vowed.
He blamed Gen Musharraf for violating the UN charter as well as the Constitution by forcing the students out though they had neither been involved in any case in their country of origin nor here.
Even the USA and the UK, direct victims of the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks respectively, did not take such a harsh step of banishing the students belonging to the countries of the suspects involved in the terror acts, he said.
Maulana Fazl declared that no scholar would be bound to inform his respective police station while leaving the area for any reason, as demanded by the government.
“We’ll violate the constraint and hold an organized protest against the measure,” said Maulana Fazl, alleging that the government was insulting the scholars by weighing them with hardened criminals.
Replying to a question about mixed marathon the Punjab government is going to hold next month, the opposition leader said courts must take notice of it like they had taken suo motu action on kite-flying and lavish wedding meals.
Earlier in the year, JUI and other religious parties’ activists had disrupted a mixed marathon in Gujranwala.
