LAHORE - Jamaat-i-Islami deputy chief and KP Senior Minister Sirajul Haq has proposed an amendment in the Constitution to provide for separate women Assemblies at national and provincial levels to protect the women’s rights.
In a statement here on Tuesday, he said that the women folk was almost 51 per cent of the country’s population but they were in minority in the Assemblies of democratic societies.
He said that in the present Assemblies, the voice of the male members was heard but the voice of the women members was stifled. As such, the present assemblies could not make effective laws for solving the problems of the women or for the protection of their rights, he added.
He said that the solutions lay in amending the Constitution to provide for separate women Assemblies at national and provincial level.
He said that Pakistan could counter the Western propaganda in regard to the women rights by setting up separate women Assemblies where the women members could show much better performance in legislation and other fields.
Besides, this would create a healthy competition between the male and the women Assemblies, he said.
MUNAWAR SLAMS GOVT POLICY ON INDIA TRADE
Jamaat-i-Islami chief Syed Munawar Hasan has said that the government move for NDMA status to India instead of the Most Favourite Nation was simply a tactic to escape public criticism because practically both were the same.
In a statement issued here on Tuesday, he said that the rulers were victim of self deception regarding India and were ignoring the ground realities.
However, he said that the nation could not shut its eyes to India’s criminal role in the break up of this country, its refusal to grant self determination right to the Kashmiris despite UN Security Council resolutions and its water aggression against this country in violation of the Indus Water Treaty.
He said the nation was being told to forget India’s past crimes to develop friendly ties with that country.
He said the rulers were adopting this destructive path under the secret IMF loan term for allowing a free trade with India, which actually aimed at building India the regional policeman.
However, he said that the entire talk of love with India in the presence of the Kashmir and India’s water aggression made no sense for this country.
Syed Munawar Hasan asked the government that instead of importing vegetables and farm products from India, it should grant the growers facilities at par with those in India to help them raise production.
He said there were around 6.6 million small agricultural farms of about five acres on which around 87 per cent of the growers depended.
The JI chief said that indiscriminate import of farm products from India would swallow these small farms and render billions of agriculturists jobless.
Rejecting the government argument that the Pakistani products would get India’s vast market, he said that the Pakistan’s farm products could not compete with those of India unless the Pakistan government offered subsidies to the land owners as was the case in India.
He said that the Indian government was giving huge subsidy to the agriculture sector. “Electricity was supplied to Indian farmers on half rate while fertiliser, pesticides, farm machinery and other farm inputs were made available on nominal rates due to which the cost of farm produce in India was below 50 per cent as compared to Pakistan the Indian agricultural products were much cheaper than those of Pakistan,” he added.
On the other hand, in Pakistan, all the subsidies provided to the agriculturists in the past had been withdrawn and instead, different taxes had been levied on the inputs, he said. The high electricity tariff and loadshedding added to the worries of the growers, he added.
Due to these factors, the agricultural products in Pakistan were much costlier as compared to India. Therefore, if vegetables and other farm products were imported from India, they would be much cheaper and this would ruin the country’s agriculture, he said.