KOHAT, Feb 25: NWFP Law Minister Malik Zafar Azam has confirmed his resignation from the cabinet and said that he took the step in protest against the federal government’s move to deprive the provincial assembly of its right to enact laws for the benefit of society.

Talking to a group of journalists after the Jamiat Tuleba-i-Islam convention here on Sunday, he accused President Pervez Musharraf of making the Hasba Bill part of his government’s malicious campaign against religious parties and mullahs to gain cheap popularity.

He said that it was the seventh time that a president had sought opinion of the apex court on an issue since independence, but the step taken by President Musharraf was unethical, illegal and based on personal grudge against religious people.

“This has widened the ideological gulf among various forces in Pakistan. It is the policy of the government in the tribal areas which has made Pakistan an insecure country where government is at war with its own people. The lawlessness in the country is the direct result of the wrong policies of the government, which will have a long-lasting affect on our future role for peace in the region,” he said.

He said that fighting so-called war against terror for the countries thousands of miles away and by targeting own people, sometimes for money as the president himself had admitted in his controversial book, was enough to make the region unstable.