LAHORE, Jan 18: JUP and Muthida Majlis-i-Amal Chief Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani said here on Friday that the government had no mandate to introduce joint electorate for minorities and reserve seats for women and technocrats in the assembly.

These amendments should have come through an elected assembly and the joint electorate was a negation of the two-nation theory, he said in a statement issued here.

Maulana Noorani said secular elements in the government wanted to destroy the ideological frontiers of the country. The slogan of first Pakistan and then Islam was wrong. “The two-nation theory was formed only because we were Muslims and then if there was a country, Pakistan could not have become a reality,” he said.

He said there was no need to reserve seats for women when they had the right to cast their votes in the general elections and to contest them. Reserve seats for women did not exist in any other democratic country in the world, he said.

Maulana Noorani said proportionate representation was the unanimous demand of all parties but this had been ignored. He welcomed the decision to increase the number of seats in the assembly and fix BA as the minimum qualification for all the candidates to the parliament.