Sharia Bill

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Reply   Reply to Sender   Recommend Message 1 in Discussion From: Indianz Post NWFP Assembly unanimously passes Sharia bill   PESHAWAR, June 02 : The North West Frontier Provincial Assembly of Pakisan consisting of majority of MMA members has passed Sharia on Monday.   The bill was adopted unanimously by the members of the NWFP Assembly after the opposition parties withdrew amendments they had proposed earlier. Governor Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah will have to sign the bill.   The six-party Islamic coalition of the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal gained a majority in the North West Frontier Assembly in October elections, on the power of a strong anti-American platform. Bringing Shariah to the deeply conservative province was the cornerstone of MMA.   Opposition legislators had tried without success to amend the bill including women's rights. But they ultimately withdrew the amendments and voted in  its favour.   The bill approved by the assembly binds local courts to interpret provincial law based upon the teachings of Shariah. It also calls for the creation of committees to bring the province's education and financial systems in line with the Quran, requires that Islamic law be taught in law schools, and prohibits the display of firearms.   The package contains few specifics, but it comes with promises to ban obscenity and vulgarity, and to set up in a second piece of legislation an "Accountability Force" to monitor corruption and fight "social evil."   The second bill, which the MMA says it will present in the coming days, would create a parallel legal system whose decisions could not be challenged by any court. The bill is expected to face fierce resistance in parliament.   The federal government can still challenge any measure of the Shariah bill that is considered contrary to national laws, which govern the penal system and other federal areas. But the provincial legislature has wide authority to make and change local laws.   Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed has said the government is studying the legislation to see if any of it conflicts with national laws.   Even before passage of the bill, the hard-line government has begun cracking down on what it considers un-Islamic activities.   Several  cinemas  have been shut and the remainder have been forced to paint over posters of women in Western clothes     From: BillaG Why Babu prefer Boota`s life

Thousands in the fields of medicine, computers and management are opting to take their skills abroad.

Apart from a better economic future, another issue is the growing conservative face of the country. Even with a decent career and economical affluence in Pakistan, many people want to leave simply to live in a more liberal environment where women have an equal chance of career growth and where people can live by their own moral standards rather than the ones imposed by the state or by the radical few. So long as the politics and economy of Pakistan do not improve, it is highly unlikely that the brain drain can be reversed or even halted. A new breed of trained and qualified politicians are needed for a new vision and a better future not only to retain trained professionals in the sciences, industry etc. but for the people at large.

It is very important for skilled people to stay in their countries. In Pakistan many people leave after getting their degrees and this causes a huge deficit in the required manpower. They should be persuaded to come back or to remain here by creating better working environments, for instance ones with less corruption and nepotism. The Government needs to create a lot more incentives for these people to stay and to work for the development of their own country .

 

Reply   Reply to Sender   Recommend Message 3 in Discussion From: Indianz Post One of the biggest long term economic problems facing Pakistan is its state of education. In fact even its problems of governance and politics are directly linked to its highly unsatisfactory performance in the education sector. Those who talk of taking democracy to the grass roots do not understand that unless you first take education to the grassroots, you simply cannot succeed in keeping exploiters from hijacking the political power at the grassroots no matter what formula you use to devolve power to the lowest rung of society, and no matter how many troops monitor the process and for how long. And you could go on spending billions to improve the lot of the agriculture, but unless you have an educated class manning the infrastructure of this sector and right on the land itself, you will continue to face food shortages and continue to increase your debt burden to cover these shortages through imports. Similarly, there is no way you can boost small and medium scale industry unless you have a vast force of educated youth having the ability and the brains to take up risky but lucrative business ventures. But while taking education to the grassroots would remain a challenge for us for many years to come what is more important today is to stop the frenzied brain drain which the country is facing currently. The decade long economic downturn in Pakistan has accelerated the brain drain which in any case was very high even during the 1980s when a boom-like situation was created in the country by the dollars which were pouring in to finance America's proxy war against the defunct Soviet Union in the neighbouring Afghanistan. In the 1970s too thousands of Pakistanis had left their country in search of greener pastures. But most of them were labourers. This was in a way the decade of labour in Pakistan because after having being exploited to the hilt for almost two long decades by the callous domestic private sector, not only were they being offered lucrative jobs in the oil rich Middle East but even in Pakistan the massive investment that the then government had undertaken in the public sector had caused their demand to go up steeply. This sudden prosperity of the semi-literate and in some cases even illiterate lower classes totally unhinged Pakistan's middle and lower middle classes who had always associated prosperity and power with education. So, the youth of these classes which under normal circumstances would have stayed home equipping itself with proper education and then joining jobs having upstream mobility also began leaving for foreign countries in search of better education and better jobs. The professional classes, like doctors engineers, civil servants and the army officers also began using their life's savings and selling the assets of their ancestors to send their sons and daughters to foreign countries hoping that this would ensure the future prospects of their children. This was the situation when the country entered the nervous nineties. And during the last ten years, the biggest employer in the country, the public sector had kept shrinking . At the same time, the private sector which had made big killings in the 1980s due to a long drawn cycle of good agricultural output, plus the American dollar led economic boom, instead of reinvesting their profits in their own country to fill the gaps which were being created due to the shrinking of public sector started stashing these profits away in foreign lands. As a result, job opportunities for both the labour classes as well as the educated youth have now completely vanished forcing young Pakistanis, literate or illiterate, educated or uneducated to look beyond the borders. This urge of one and all to get out has given rise to a new business in this country-the business of dubious but costly education. Schools, colleges and universities of all kinds of hues and colours claiming to prepare the youth for jobs in foreign countries have mushroomed all over the country. They charge you very heavy fees, provide you with an atmosphere almost similar to the ones found on the campuses of foreign universities, but the quality of their teaching and teaching staff is normally far below even the local standards. The issue here is not of the quality of education found in these institutions, but the fact that every one who can afford, no matter to which class he belonged to , is trying to get his or her children prepared for jobs in foreign countries. Of course, there is no harm if we could keep on exporting our surplus labour and educated youth to foreign countries. This will not only ease the supply-demand situation in favour of those who prefer not to go abroad but their remittances would also go a long way in easing the country's balance of payments situation. But what is happening to Pakistan currently is not this simple. It is not the surplus which is going out. In fact the surplus is staying back and adding to the high rate of unemployment. There is an economic boom in the West, especially in America which is attracting the best brains from all over the world including Pakistan. And we are losing by the thousands every year those very youngsters who are needed to take over the management of the country in the coming years. The next generation of the ruling elite of this country have already left. There is not single family from the ruling elite of the country whose younger members have not already gone out for education and jobs. It is the same in the case of the bright ones from among the middle and lower classes and from the families of professionals like doctors, engineers, civil servants and army officers. The stuff which we are left with now is not fit even to man the clerical jobs. And unless something is done and quickly to stop this brain drain, ten years down the line, the country will slip into the hands of the totally uneducated, perhaps even illiterate classes.