Crusade against 'radical' madressahs going nowhere

Three months after the National Action Plan (NAP) was unveiled and more than two months after Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan's revealed that perhaps 10 per cent of all madressahs were involved in terrorism; no Pakistani government agency is willing to take up the task of identifying these seminaries.

While the relevant officials in National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta) and the interior ministry refused to comment on the issue officially, a senior Nacta official disclosed that the Ministry of Religious Affairs was the lead coordination agency for this effort, reported the Dawn.

An interior ministry official said that the interior secretary had asked the religious affairs secretary to coordinate with seminaries over matters of financing, especially foreign funding, madressah registration and monitoring.

The report said that the religious affairs department was the only government department which had been directly involved in negotiating with the seminaries publicly.