Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians (PPPP) has denounced the Hasba Bill and questioned what it called an un-understandable silence on part of the ruling coalition over the issue. "The Hasba bill is against of the Constitution, violates the fundamental human rights of citizens and a blatant attempt of the Talibanisation that will push the people into the dark ages in the name of Islam," PPPP spokesperson Senator Faratullah Babar said in a statement issued here on Sunday.
He said his party condemns the bill in the strongest possible terms and urged the human rights bodies and civil society to thwart this naked bid to rob them of their rights guaranteed in the Constitution behind the façade of religion.
The MMA government plans to move the Hasba bill in the NWFP Assembly on Monday. The bill allows the provincial government to establish a chain of offices of religious ombudsmen at the district and tehsil levels.
"Spending of hundreds of millions of rupees on these new institutions amounts to foisting medieval nonsense at public expense," Faratullah said.
The Senator said the law would raise a new police on the citizens to impose a partisan view in the name of 'propagation of virtue and preventing the evil' (Amr bil-maroof wa nahin anil munkar).
Farhatullah Babar said that the bill was aimed only at doling out judicial jobs in grade 18 to 20 to Madressah graduates on the one hand and to fool the people on the other. The PPPP spokesman warned against the implications of allowing the 'Pakistani Taliban' to regulate the private lives of citizens in the name of enforcing 'Islamic value system'.
He said laws already existed for dealing with the criminals and demanded that existing laws should be implemented rather than making new ones.