PESHAWAR, Pakistan, 12 July 2005 — Opposition parties yesterday angrily denounced the Hisbah Bill when the controversial proposed law was presented in the NWFP Assembly.
Opposition lawmakers chanted “unacceptable” and tore up or threw copies of the proposed “Hisbah Act,” or accountability act, immediately after Law Minister Malik Zafar Azam introduced it for debate in the North West Frontier Province’s legislature.
The proposed law calls for setting up muhtasib offices on provincial and district levels to ensure adherence to Islamic values at public places, and during weekly Friday prayers.
The bill will also ensure adherence of prayers and Azan timings. Misuse of loud speakers and sectarian speeches in mosques would also be discouraged under the proposed law.
The government will provide the muhtasib with a police force to enforce the law. No court or authority will be able to question actions taken by the muhtasib. Nor will courts be allowed to issue a stay order, an interim order or an adjournment of any matter under consideration of the muhtasib office.
The Hisbah Bill, which was initiated in the assembly by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal government, is against the constitution, violates the fundamental human rights of citizens, is a recipe for polarizing society; and a blatant attempt to “Talebanize” the province and will push the people back into the dark ages, said Sen. Farhatullah Babar, Pakistan People’s Party spokesman.
He said the PPP condemned the bill and urged human rights organizations and the civil society to thwart this attempt to rob them of their rights guaranteed by the constitution. He said the bill allowed the provincial government to set up a chain of offices of religious ombudsmen at the provincial, district and tehsil levels and “raise a brigade of new Hisbah police” in the name of propagation of virtue and prevention of vice.
He said the bill aimed to give judicial jobs in grades 18 to 20 to madrassa graduates and to fool the people in the name of local elections.
He warned against Talebanizing Pakistani society and regulating the private lives of people in the name of enforcing an Islamic value system. “Spending hundreds of millions of rupees on these new institutions amounts to imposing medieval nonsense,” he said.
He said laws already existed to deal with the problems listed in the bill and sincerity demanded that the existing laws were implemented rather than making new ones.
He said it was atrocious that the muhtasib had been given powers under Section 10 (c) to regulate the media and promote what the “Pakistani Taleban” regard as “Islamic values”.
The senator said the religious parties in collusion with undemocratic forces had undermined Parliament by endorsing the 17th Amendment to the constitution and now, launched another assault on Parliament through the Hisbah Bill.
Last September, he said the Council of Islamic Ideology had declared that the Hisbah Bill was in contradiction to the constitution and “will not achieve the purposes of Shariah and instead raise controversies over the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah.”
All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) Chairman Shahbaz Bhatti described the bill as unconstitutional, undemocratic, irrelevant, inhumane and religious marshal law.
