Daily Times

LAHORE: Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) has decided to launch a countrywide campaign against the Aga Khan Board, foreign students’ expulsion from religious seminaries and secularisation of education in a unanimously passed resolution on the second day of the party’s three-day central council meeting chaired by Qazi Hussain Ahmed in Mansoora on Sunday.

“Non-representative rulers have made the country’s education system a laboratory for every immoral imported concept disregarding its compatibility with national needs and aspirations,” the resolution said. It said deregularisation and foreign pressure were excuses to allow colonial powers’ representatives to gain a key role in making educational policies and the Aga Khan Board was a major step towards this goal.

The central council condemned the removal of verses on jihad, freedom, biographies of Islamic heroes and ideology of Pakistan from syllabi and said the prayer method was removed from the curriculum on foreign powers’ behest. It said provocative material was being added to the curriculum and condemned the inclusion of a poem praising US President George W Bush in higher secondary syllabus.

It said the government had allotted 1,000 acres of land in Karachi to the Aga Khan Foundation for free, enabling the foundation to set up its headquarters and ultimately gain control over Pakistan’s schools, colleges and universities.

The council condemned President Pervez Musharraf’s proposal of joint syllabi in India and Pakistan and said Pakistan’s education system was meant to create national unity and not to promote unification of South Asia.

JI’s apex policy-making body also condemned what it called the ‘selling and gifting’ of esteemed national educational institutions to secular NGOs and Christian missionaries, and said it was against Pakistan’s interests.

It said the $33 million US aid for reformation of education and student and teacher exchange schemes were a plan to influence Pakistan’s education system.

It said the government had lost control over education because the private sector was not abiding by the rules and regulations. The resolution condemned increase in fees and ‘encouragement of waywardness by allowing co-education.’

Entry tests for professional colleges were held in major cities to protect certain people’s interests and discourage the poor, it said.

The council demanded implementation of Article 251 to adopt Urdu as Pakistan’s official language and medium of instruction.

The resolution said Pakistani people would not allow the government to secularise education and the education system would be protected at all costs.

In a separate resolution against the recent increase in natural gas prices, the council said it was a “New Year gift by the rulers to the poor.” The resolution condemned the increase in petroleum, oil and lubricant (POL) product prices and said it had resulted in increased transport fares making people’s life miserable. The council said POL product prices were decreasing in the international market and demanded withdrawal of increase in Gas prices and revision of POL product prices. It said the rulers’ extravagant and luxurious lifestyle cost people their hard-earned money.