Daily Times

In the ongoing constitutional petition in the Supreme Court (SC) of Pakistan challenging the 18th Amendment, i.e. Constitution Petition 12/2010, Ben Hur Yousaf, the president of the Christian Democratic Party, has filed an application “to assist the Honourable Supreme Court” on matters germane to the election and representation of religious minorities in the Republic’s parliament.

These demands are modest; he wants 17 reserved National Assembly seats for non-Muslims and he wants direct election for these seats. According to this formula, he also wants 18 seats in Punjab and six seats in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He also wants five seats in the Senate, with one from the Islamabad capital territory to be added to the existing four. Presumably, he also wants election to the five Senate seats to be the exclusive preserve of non-Muslim legislators elected — not selected — on reserved seats in the provincial and national legislatures. The formula he has applied is five seats to 100 general seats, which is more or less consistent with the original scheme of the 1973 Constitution, which had 10 seats to 204 general constituencies.

The basic principle for demanding secured minorities’ representation in the national legislature is also in keeping with the spirit of the 14 points that are said to be the cornerstone of Pakistan’s ideology. Finally, it is one of the fundamental premises of the Lahore Resolution, which states that “adequate, effective and mandatory safeguards should be specifically provided in the constitution for minorities in these units and in these regions for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and other rights and interests in consultation with them.”

Yousaf’s demands are eminently sensible and, as a whole, good for Pakistan. In fact, the Muslim majority ought to be generous and give the minorities more than their numbers. The biggest impediment to this is of course opposition from the political parties because under the current system of selection even parties openly hostile to minorities’ interests can in theory get a share of the non-Muslim seats, thereby defeating the very purpose of the reserved seats in the first place. Political parties of all kinds therefore are likely to resist these demands because it would force them to actually reach out to religious minorities in the electoral process, something they are not currently required to do. This is really what the political parties are mortally afraid of. They want the seats and pay lip service to minorities’ rights but they do not want to be held accountable to them. In the process, the minorities feel alienated and without a seat at the table in determining matters of their own destiny. In a majoritarian Islamic Republic, this has turned them into a hapless and frightened lot perpetually at the mercy of a Muslim majority that is neither generous nor sympathetic. It must be emphasised that this is nothing less than a betrayal of the lofty promises made to the religious minorities in Pakistan at the time of independence.

If we were to be honest to ourselves and to the origins of Pakistan itself, which emerged out of a minority’s legitimate concerns about their future in a United India, we would not only give the minorities their due but would also give them a veto over any matter that directly relates to their wellbeing or future. Such an action would restore their confidence in the majority and would help mainstream them as Pakistanis instead of perpetually ghettoising them as minorities. The decision to reintroduce joint electorates in 2002 was the right one but it ought to have been done in tandem with directly electable reserved seats in the legislature. Giving the minorities in Pakistan a double vote would not only help them but would go a long way in improving the image of the country.

The 18th Amendment, while laudable for many reasons and especially for the fact that it restored the word “freely” to the Objectives Resolution under 2-A, was nonetheless problematic in so far as it closed the door to non-Muslims to aspire for the office of Prime Minister (PM). I wrote about this in detail in my article ‘Parliamentary Theocracy’ (Daily Times, April 15, 2010). It is a great paradox that the Eighth Amendment under General Zia’s dictatorship, which otherwise sounded the death knell for democracy in Pakistan, had in fact left the door open for non-Muslims to become the PM. This may just have been a mistake in drafting because the oath of office for the PM was still that of a Muslim. The 18th Amendment, which sought to undo many of those historic wrongs, nonetheless also undid the one inadvertent opening for religious minorities. This also needs to be revisited by the SC of Pakistan in light not just of the Constitution but also in light of the promises made by the founding fathers of Pakistan. It bears repeating that the first PM of Pakistan, Liaqat Ali Khan, speaking on the Objectives Resolution in 1949, specifically assured that under the Constitution of Pakistan any non-Muslim would be able to hold the highest offices — head of state and head of government — in the land. Today, however, a non-Muslim Pakistani, who is said to be an equal citizen of Pakistan, cannot hold the office of the president or the PM. This is terrible discrimination and a historic wrong that needs to be rectified by the SC of Pakistan.

Pakistan is a Muslim majority country and nobody can change that. However, Pakistan does not belong to Muslims alone. Even by current estimates based on a flawed census, the number of non-Muslims in Pakistan is close to 10 million people. Some 10 million Pakistanis have been made to feel like aliens in their own homes. For the sake of those millions, I hope the SC seriously revisits the question of minorities in the light of the 18th Amendment.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com