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Govt reluctant to expel foreign madrassa students

By Hasan Mansoor

KARACHI: The provincial home department has been asked to wait for sometime in carrying out its plans to expel hundreds of foreign students enrolled with the seminaries in Sindh, sources in the government told Daily Times.

The home department had initially issued notices to most of the Islamic seminaries asking them to expel all the foreign students enrolled with them and surrender their passports to make arrangements for their deportation.

Senior officials in the Sindh home department said they had originally planned to get all the foreign students, including girls, expelled from the seminaries by the end of last year and start repatriating them to their native countries. For this, sources said, the government had negotiated with Edhi Foundation and some other charities to arrange temporary lodgings for these students.

“These students were to be lodged at those temporary abodes until their final deportation but the seminary administrations totally refused to hand them over to us,” said an official. Sources said Wafaq-ul-Madaris al-Arabia, the largest among the five religious education boards that form a confederacy called Ittehad Tanzeematul Madaris-e-Deeniya Pakistan (ITMDP), had made it clear to the senior authorities in Islamabad that any attempt to expel foreign students forcibly could create a huge law and order situation in the country.

“Such an attempt could enrage the rest of our students, which would make it far difficult for us to control them effectively,” said a leader in the Wafaq. Sources said the provincial home department had got instructions from Islamabad asking them to defer its plans of expulsions for quite some time until the authorities had some negotiations with the ITMDP.

The ITMDP leadership had made a clear-cut announcement in its press conference in Karachi on December 31 that they would defy the government’s orders for the expulsion and would resist it.

The seminary alliance also held a convention in Islamabad in which various political parties including the ruling PML-Q had been invited on the first day of this year. The ITMDP reiterated its stance vis-à-vis the expulsions and got support from many of the religious and political parties for that.

The home department had recently asked the police department to serve a notice to the seminaries in Karachi and other parts of the province asking them to surrender the foreign students. The police complied with the orders but was confronted with a defiant response.

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