ISLAMABAD
The National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law, Justice and Human Rights on Monday debated a proposed bill to increase seats for minorities from 10 to 16.
The meeting convened by Chairman Bashir Ahmad Virk, while debating the proposed bill by JUI-F’s minority representative Aasia Nasir, was briefed by members that minority representation was quite low as compared to the ratio of population.
Members referred to various clauses and articles and deliberated that according to the pre-18th Amendment situation, 216 seats were reserved for Muslims; while the post-18th amendment scenario ended this and seats were renamed as general seats, enabling non-Muslims to be elected directly.
Aasia regretted absence of any such culture enabling minorities to be elected directly. She also expressed her pride in Pakistan being only country having separate electorates for minorities.
However, PPP’s Ayaz Soomro wanted the issue to be adjourned for further deliberations while urging minorities to contest from general seats, since there were no restrictions.
He also said that a census summary had already been forwarded to the prime minister and further deliberation over the issue would be meaningless prior to the summary approval.
PML-N lawmaker Chaudhry Ashraf cited the example of Muslim minority in India, which could not avail any special allocations for minorities, while Pakistan had reserved seats for minorities and women.
Virk said that the secular India’s example could not be compared to religious Pakistan having allocations for minorities and women.
Another bill related to formation of a high court bench in Balochistan’s Loralai was also deliberated. The chairman informed the committee that the issue awaited comments of the CJP. The body decided to wait for 15 days in this regard before declaring its own decision over the issue.
The committee also urged the government for an urgent census, since all kind of wrong estimates and observations about population were being carried out, while the population had increased from 180 million to 250 million.
