By Ravinder Singh

Desperation can make people lose their minds and this has afflicted PAS President Hadi Awang, who made a ridiculous comparison between amputating limbs to save lives and the religious police amputating limbs in vengeance as punishment in the name of God.

Are those who cannot understand the reasons for the rise in crime and overall decline of society’s moral values fit to lord over the people, based on perceptions and hallucinations?

Has Hadi worked with children from their early childhood, through their teens and into adulthood to understand how innocent children acquire either good or bad character; how and why angelic children can turn out to be devilish adults?

Hadi should meditate honestly on the state of the schools today and compare them with the schools of the 1950s and 1960s. Did we have this unprecedented level of indiscipline in today’s schools way back then?

Why has school discipline deteriorated so much that today in many or even most secondary schools, teachers really fear their pupils? Why do teachers also fear the parents for disciplining their children?

Why have children been allowed to take control of schools by being allowed to terrorise the very people who are supposed to be educating them and moulding their character, i.e. their teachers?

Hadi and his ilk, who are harping on hudud, should take stock of this. Is there no religious or moral education in schools that is supposed to mould the character of children? Why is there no success although statistics in the form of exam results in these two subjects paint a good picture?

Moral Education was introduced as a subject sometime in the 1970s when school discipline started declining after teachers were prohibited from using the cane.

As discipline was still going down several years later, the subject was “upgraded” to an examination subject.

Discipline remained on the decline and the subject was further “upgraded” to a compulsory examination subject, yet the education system failed to check the continually declining discipline of our school children. This is the root of the nation’s moral rot.

Hadi should explain why he is against a light cane being used by teachers and parents to correct misbehaviour, when it is best and most effectively done, and instead wants us to believe that he is sent by God to check rising crime among adults by cutting off their hands as a deterrent.

Hadi, if parents knew that uncontrolled eating can lead to diabetes and diabetes can lead to gangrene, and gangrene could mean cutting off the affected limbs, would any sane parent want to see their children having their limbs cut off because of a preventable condition?

So should parents be educated about their children’s eating habits, and how to inculcate good eating habits, or left ignorant about this so that people making and selling junk food can make money and then hospitals also can make money trying to “cure” the disease and perform amputations?

Good for the economy, is it?

And Hadi, pray tell us what is wrong about using a light cane, only as and when necessary, to correct child misbehaviour from the moment they start picking it up from their surroundings, rather than turning a blind eye to it until they become full-fledged criminals and then wanting to use hudud to chop off their hands?

The rise of crime is the direct result of the decline of child discipline, which is a result of the failure of the education system to mould a child’s character.

Please look into this and not go about shouting that hudud will cure society’s ills as it has not succeeded in doing so, and will not.

God’s law must apply to every human being, from the lord to the servant.

But what we have seen is that the implementers of hudud have exempted certain individuals from hudud. Does the Quran allow this exemption?

Ravinder Singh is an FMT reader.

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