Amendment to Citizenship Act

Through your esteemed daily we would like to invite the attention of the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs on the issue. If the government has presented any Bill in the Parliament relating to the Citizenship Act of 1951, during the year 2005.
In the year 2004, Kunwar Khalid Yunus of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement complained that his Bill in the National Assembly was being ignored for a few months. The Bill was related to amendments in the 1951 Citizenship Act, in which a Pakistani woman's foreign husband was not allowed Pakistani nationality. It is really surprising that the Bill of an ally of the ruling government in the National Assembly was ignored.
Finally in April 2005, Kunwar Khalid Yunus of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and Ms Mehnaz Rafi of the ruling PML agreed not to press their identical private Bills seeking to amend the Pakistan Citizenship Act of 1951 after the Parliamentary Affairs Minister assured them that the government would bring a comprehensive Bill of its own on the issue and would incorporate their proposals.
In March 1978, the Government of Pakistan issued a presidential ordinance stripping all Pakistanis left in Bangladesh, after the December 1971, of their nationality, unilaterally, retroactively, arbitrarily and en masse. Due to Article 16 and 16-A of the Act of Citizenship of 1951, around 100,000 the Pakistanis are refused their citizenship rights and they are running from pillar to post to get their computerised national identity cards. There are so many cases on the record of denial of citizenship rights by NADRA officials who came to Pakistan without the blessings of the government. Most of these people even hold old NICs and/or Pakistani passports.
According to former Sindh Minister for Law and Minority Affairs Muzaffar Sadiq Bhatti, President Pervez Musharraf had assured the leaders of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement that those who had entered Pakistan, up to 1986, would be given citizenship and that Biharis would be issued NICs but it turned out to be a violation of the Pakistan Citizens Act, 1951 and 1952 rules, as well as the Sindh Permanent Residentship Rules, 1971, and NADRA rules. He said that the constitution did not give any authority to the President to tamper with the country's laws and rules in presence of the Assembly. To him, the parliament alone enjoyed this authority.
Since this issue has been raised on and off by the leaders of the Muttahida Quami Movement, the ally of the ruling party, as well as the leaders of the opposition, especially the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, it is high time to address the hardships faced by the Bihari community, whose loyalty to this country is unquestionable, by making or amending laws in the Parliament instead of protesting and holding press conferences or writing letters to NADRA officials.