March 23, 2007	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 3, 1428

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LAHORE, March 22: Prominent Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) leaders said on Thursday they did not agree with suggestions that Justice Rana Bhagwandas should not be sworn in as the acting chief justice of Pakistan because he was a non-Muslim.

MMA secretary-general Maulana Fazlur Rahman told Dawn that the alliance believed in the supremacy of the 1973 Constitution which only barred a non-Muslim from becoming the state president and prime minister but did not bar a non-Muslim heading the superior judiciary.

The Maulana said Justice Rana Bhagwandas had performed duties as the acting chief justice more than once in the past without anyone objection to it. “We wish the state was governed by the tenets of the Islamic Shariah. Our problem is that we do not have the Shariah and the only course left for us is the 1973 Constitution,” Maulana Fazl said.

“If we do not apply the constitution to resolve our problems, we could land in another crisis,” he said and added that the constitution had a solution to the situation.

To MMA’s senior vice-president, Senator Prof Sajid Mir, the question of a non-Muslim heading the superior judiciary was irrelevant and unwarranted.

Talking to Dawn, Prof Mir, the amir of the Markazi Jamiat Ahal-i-Hadith, said the people who had opposed Justice Rana Bhagwandas’s appointment as the acting chief justice of Pakistan either had no political status or they were serving certain vested interests.

“There is no such provision as to bar a non-Muslim to be appointed as the chief of Pakistan or, for that matter, the armed forces,” Prof Mir said.

He said religious parties wanted an amendment to the 1973 Constitution to ensure that a Muslim alone could be the chief justice or the chief of armed forces. But until the change was made, there was no bar on a non-Muslim to head the country’s superior judiciary.

Prof Sajid Mir said the delay in the ARD-sponsored multi-party conference in London had “certainly not gone in favour of the opposition”. But he did add the PML-N had postponed the MPC consultation with the MMA on the current situation.

He advised Pakistan People’s Party chairperson Benazir Bhutto to review her stance regarding the MMA because “unity in the opposition’s ranks was the need of the hour and anyone looking beyond the democratic struggle to gain power, would suffer”