Marginalising the minorities

As successive governments have found in Pakistan, the best way to avoid doing something is to form a committee or working party ‘to look into’ whatever it does not want to do anything about; whilst at the same time giving the impression that it is. There are any number of dormant committees, some of them years old, doing nothing and going nowhere. One such is the National Commission for Minorities (NCM), which is not merely dormant but seemingly in a permanent vegetative state. It was formed by the prime minister in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in 2014 relating to minority rights. Nothing constructive appears to have happened since. The matter has surfaced courtesy of minority lawmakers who were attending a consultative dialogue titled Preserving Equal Citizenship in Pakistan. Lawmakers were critical of the Minister of Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Sardar Muhammad Yusuf for failing to hold a meeting of the NCM of which he is the chairman.

Why this matters is that the delay is holding up the finalisation of a policy on minority rights, and if there is one thing the government is not looking to do, it is strengthening the legal hand of any minority and opening up channels of accountability for them hitherto non-existent. The NCM was to formulate the policy for forwarding to the cabinet division but there has not been a meeting of the commission for the last six months and none is scheduled either. If the government were serious about policy formulation for minorities, it would long ago have chivvied Mr Sardar into action — it did nothing of the sort and we are forced to conclude that the minorities, along with their unwritten policy, have been kicked into the long grass. The likely reason for ministerial non-attendance is that once the policy is approved via the cabinet division, it would give the NCM the legal cover it needs to operate effectively — or indeed at all. Committees — the cutting edge of doing nothing whatsoever.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 1^st, 2016.

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