SHC directs authorities to submit copy of Peshawar High Court order

KARACHI: The Sindh High Court (SHC) directed on Monday the additional attorney-general to place on record a copy of the Peshawar High Court’s (PHC) order regarding inclusion of a separate column for religious minorities in the forms for the national census 2017.

A two-judge bench, headed by Justice Munib Akhtar, directed the federal law officer to submit the document by March 30. The bench was hearing a petition filed by Sikhs, who are one of the religious minorities of the country. They had approached the court seeking direction for the federal and provincial authorities to count Sikhism as a religion in the ongoing national census.

The community’s leader, Sardar Hira Singh, said in the petition that there was no separate column in the forms being used by the enumerators during the door-to-door national data collection drive. He alleged that the forms contain separate columns for registration of other religious minorities or communities, whose population is numbered in few thousands but there was not one for the Sikhs.

Singh added that there were no actual data available of the Sikh community’s population in the country. Despite this, they were not being counted as a separate religious minority in the census, he alleged. Therefore, the court was pleaded to order the statistics bureau and others to add a separate column to include Sikhism as a religion and count its population in the forms.

On Monday, Additional Attorney-General Salman Talibuddin informed the judges that the Peshawar High Court had already passed a direction for inclusion of the Sikh community in the census. Therefore, he pleaded that the petition may be dismissed, as it had become infructuous.

However, the bench members observed that the passage of different orders or directives by separate courts on the same issue will lead to confusion. Therefore, they directed Talibuddin to place on record a copy of the PHC’s order by March 30.

Source: The Express Tribune