ISLAMABAD, Dec 31: A local lawyer filed a petition in the Supreme Court on Friday seeking disqualification of Interior Minister Rehman Malik for allegedly wrongly reciting Surah Ikhlas at the start of a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

In the petition moved under the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court on enforcement of fundamental rights, Advocate Mr Tariq Asad requested the court to declare the minister disqualified to become a member of parliament.

An embarrassing video clip of the interior minister shows him allegedly incorrectly reciting versus of the Surah and his cabinet colleagues jeering him.

The petitioner regretted that the minister tried four times to correctly recite the holy Surah but made the same mistake every time. He claimed that Mr Malik's ignorance of the fundamentals of Islam showed that he was not qualified to contest elections of parliament. Besides the minister, the federal government, through the Cabinet Secretary, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Justice (retd) Hamid Ali Mirza, Senate chairman Farooq H. Naek and the prime minister are respondents in the petition.

The petitioner has requested the Supreme Court to direct the Senate chairman to refer the matter to the CEC to declare Mr Rehman Malik disqualified under Article 63(2) (disqualifications to become member of parliament) of the Constitution.

The prime minister should also be directed by the court to remove the minister from the cabinet, the petitioner contended.

It is a sine qua non for democracy and good governance that the people in parliament should be of good character, God-fearing and mindful of their obligations as elected representative of the people, the petition said.

It is necessary in achieving this goal that candidates contesting elections should be truly possessed with qualities prescribed by the Constitution under Article 62.

The contents of Article 62 had been derived from the Holy Quran and Sunnah and were founded on the ideology of Pakistan, the petitioner said, adding that it required all Muslims to have full opportunity to live in accordance with their faith and creed based on the tenets of the Quran.

It is the constitutional duty of all organs of the state, including the judiciary, to make every possible effort to ensure adequate enforcement of the constitutional provisions in regard to qualification of members of assemblies, he stated.