Verdict on Hasba bill
THE rejection of parts of the Hasba bill by the Supreme Court has both political and legal implications. The MMA’s immediate reaction was to regard it as a “partial victory”. The federal government, which took the matter to the apex court, too, will feel happy at the outcome, for the verdict virtually nullifies a highly controversial and retrogressive law seeking to regulate people’s personal and public life. The timing of the Supreme Court decision may help the MMA in the sense that the six-party alliance may exploit the rejection of some key clauses of the bill in the coming local body elections and tell the people that its efforts to give the people of the NWFP an Islamic way of life have been obstructed by the federal government. In any case, the MMA hasn’t lost much, for the Supreme Court has not rejected the whole bill but has held several important clauses of it ultra vires of the Constitution. This means that the MMA could re-draft the bill and have it passed again, paving the way perhaps for another legal battle. That is how it should be, for democracy stipulates all issues to be settled by legal and constitutional means rather than through street agitation. If the MMA and all other political parties accept this principle with sincerity and pledge to fight all political battles politically the nation will be the gainer.
The basic principle behind the Hasba bill was flawed. Public morality cannot be legislated. The state cannot stop people from lying by enacting a law prohibiting it nor can it supervene the people’s right to dress the way they like or listen to the music of their choice. The problem is worsened when morality is sought to be enforced by policemen. Ignoring for a moment what the level of knowledge and skill of those policemen would be, the most worrying factor is that a religious police were to be established by a highly politicized and sanctimonious leadership whose concept of Islam and interpretation of the shariat are not acceptable to many others. Islam came to the world as a liberating force — history testifies to the relief that the pauperized peasantry and the urban populace felt when the Byzantine and Sassanid empires came to an end in the Middle East. Even the most bigoted of non-Muslim historians have admitted that the mass conversions that followed stemmed from the kind of liberal society that Islam envisaged. This aspect of Islam — tolerance and persuasion rather than force and tyranny — seems to have been overlooked by the authors of the Hasba bill.
The bill also seeks to make the mohtasib (ombudsman) a law unto himself, for no court would be allowed to question his verdicts. This smacks of fascism and reminds us of the “people’s courts” which fascist dictators set up in the ‘30s and ‘40s to eliminate “the people’s enemies”. A faith meant for all humanity cannot be allowed to be distorted simply because some people consider their view of Islam to be the only one to be foisted on the people. As Justice Javed Iqbal has said, the Hasba bill would not constitute “a positive change” and would shake the people’s belief in Islamic values. In today’s Pakistan, the guiding principles for the interpretation of Islam should be those enunciated by the man who dreamt of Pakistan, Iqbal, and the man who turned the dream into reality — Jinnah.
Remembering Hiroshima
SIXTY years after America dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the lessons of nuclear devastation remain largely unlearnt. The danger of global nuclear proliferation has never been greater, while the five official nuclear powers — Britain, France, China, Russia and the US (which together possess around 36,500 N-warheads) — have failed to comply with Article VI of the NPT that calls for negotiations on nuclear disarmament. In fact, according to recent reports, Britain has been revamping its nuclear stockpile and the US Senate has approved funds for the making of the “robust nuclear earth penetrator”. Meanwhile, years of regional discord have led at least three states — India, Pakistan and Israel — to develop nuclear weapons of their own. North Korea has admitted it possesses these weapons of mass destruction as well, exacerbating tensions in East Asia, while Iran, suspicious of Israel’s designs, is said to be pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme.
It is true that there are some states like Libya, Brazil and South Africa that have given up their nuclear quest. But there are those that have not done so; caught up in mutual distrust, political insecurity, and a dangerous global power game, they have chosen to ignore the horror of an atomic attack of the kind that devastated Hiroshima, and three days later, Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands were killed and injured, with survivors developing lifelong complications, affecting not only themselves but future generations as well. Unfortunately, human memory is short, and if this factor is responsible for governments’ reluctance to renounce their nuclear ambitions, then they should at least respond to present-day realities and the massive expenditure on arms programmes that have resulted in poverty and poor socio-economic development. The debate over whether America was politically justified in bombing Japan continues to rage on, as does the one on whether states should be allowed to develop or retain N-arms in the post Cold War era. But as the events of August 1945 illustrate, the level of human misery caused by nuclear attacks should override all political reasons for possessing such lethal weapons.
FPSC chief’s complaints
OUT-OF-TURN promotions, repeated extensions in service or ‘lateral entry’ appointments have been part and parcel of the chequered history of the civil services of Pakistan. Prime ministers have used their discretionary powers to grant extensions to senior bureaucrats or inducted individuals from the private sector into government-run organizations. In that sense, it may be argued that they have done nothing illegal and only used the powers vested in their office. There is also the argument that following the rule of seniority alone can sometimes mean that the rule of appointing officers on merit, regardless of age, must be dispensed with. However, when the chairman of the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) says that, and more, at a press conference, then the government needs to sit up and take notice. A coincidence or not, the FPSC chairman’s remarks to the press came after newspapers reported that several senior bureaucrats had been re-employed on contract after reaching their retirement age. In one case, the head of a key government agency is reported to have been given repeated extensions for inexplicable reasons.
The FPSC chief must have been referring to such cases in his press briefing because he seemed to raise the matter with the government as why must a bureaucrat be considered so indispensable that he should be given several extensions in office. One way for the government to allay the concerns of the FPSC is to give in writing and place on the official record the reasons for granting an extension in service to a bureaucrat or an out-of-turn promotion or appointment. This will help this government inject greater transparency in selection and appointment of government officials and also place some kind of a check on the tendency among governments to use such tactics to manipulate or browbeat the bureaucracy for their own narrow ends.