Another attempt

The government, led by the federal interior minister, has gone in for yet another attempt to regulate seminaries and their sources of funding in the country. At a high-level meeting on Monday in Islamabad chaired by the prime minister and attended by the COAS amongst the other top officials, representatives of all five schools of religious thought were told that seminaries would in the future be permitted to open bank accounts and would be expected to carry out all their transactions through them. The gathered ulema were also informed that no preaching of hate speech or incitement to violence would be tolerated. They were also assured that the random crackdown on seminaries would stop. The action falls under the National Action Plan and is intended to prevent the growth of extremism in the country by imposing tougher checks on all organisations that may in some manner be promoting extremist thought. The prime minister told the meeting that there would be no compromise on this principle and that seminaries in Punjab would also be regulated in the same fashion.
It may be noted that the majority of seminaries in the country are run by hard-line groups, although only a small number are directly involved in militancy. According to figures given out by the interior minister, three million students are enrolled at 18,000 seminaries across the country – making seminaries a huge part of our education system. The problem is that we seem to be going around in circles – five-year circles to be precise. In 2005 the Musharraf regime made an attempt to regulate seminaries; in 2010 a similar bid was made under the then PPP regime and now in 2015 we see the same process being repeated. There has been little analysis of why past attempts have floundered. There is little continuity of policy and we now seem to be starting all over again. The problems appear to be that those running seminaries are not willing to cooperate fully with the government in every case. This time too there have been objections to the registration process. Some agreements have been reached, but mistrust obviously exists. It is also a reality that seminaries meet the needs of a very large percentage of people. To effectively counter them, in the longer term, we need a policy to resurrect our public school system and make it a viable option for parents. There also has to be some decision on where seminaries stand in the education system with shorter-term planning then developed to control illegal activities at any of these institutions.