Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government’s decision to place seminaries under the supervision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Department is a welcome one. The step is aimed at mainstreaming seminaries. The department will now be handling registration, curriculum, examination, and monitoring of seminaries. External oversight of seminaries was long overdue, and the process should be initiated in other provinces as well. It had been unanimously agreed upon by all stakeholders in the National Action Plan (NAP).
However, the possibility of the KP government mishandling the process cannot be ruled out considering it had given a hefty amount of Rs300million to the notorious seminary of hard-line cleric and self-declared ‘father of Taliban’ Maulana Samiul Haq ‘to help bring seminary students to the mainstream’.
The decision to fund a seminary that had served as a nursery for many high-profile militants including Mullah Omar was flawed and it showed the PTI government’s ignorance towards the problem of extremism. Therefore, it is important to remind the provincial government that the process of mainstreaming seminaries has to be carried out with extreme caution. The fact of the matter is that the need for ‘mainstreaming’ arose because there were extremist tendencies in seminary students.
The criteria on basis of which the supervision of these seminaries will be carried out by the provincial government should, therefore, be made public. Because, as odd as it may sound, the provincial authorities cannot be counted on for ensuring eradication of extremist content from the seminaries curricula because they have themselves been introducing controversial content in the curricula at public schools at the behest of their ally, Jamaat-e-Islam (JI). The secular content introduced by the previous government was removed to appease the religious quarters.
While going ahead with the process of mainstreaming seminaries, the provincial government must refrain from appeasing religious extremists. *
Published in Daily Times, January 12th 2018.
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