December 3, 2001	Monday	Ramazan 17, 1422

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LAHORE, Dec 2: Pakistan is the product of federalism and democracy and its concept is not that of an ideological utopia, says former Sindh governor Barrister Kamal Azfar.

He was speaking at the 11th Dr C A Qadir memorial lecture here at Alhamra on Sunday. Former adviser to the president M P Bhandara presided.

Quoting Indo-Pak history, the Quaid-i-Azam, Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the veteran politician and senior lawyer said Pakistan was a new country and the Pakistanis a new nation. “Therefore, its people must learn to love this land and be proud of it. We should own whatever the country has and whatever history and geographic boundaries have given us,” he said.

Eversince the creation of Pakistan, according to him, its people had been wrestling with the fundamental question of how power was to be exercised here.

“It is our collective fault that we have so far been unable to lay the solid foundation of a government of laws rather than of men,” he said.

Mr Azfar said the elites had their own selective list of heroes or villains in the country’s political life but their perception was not shared by the masses who always voted for the mainstream political parties.

He said today the establishment was speaking of the 1990s as a lost decade which was an irony because it was the period when Pakistan emerged as the first Muslim nuclear power.

“Of course, the 1990s was lost to the generals. Pakistan was founded on the thesis of a federation achieved through democratic means but its history recorded the anti-thesis of both federalism and democracy by centralization and dictatorship,” the former governor said.

Thus, he said, there was a contradiction between the centralizing tendency of an ideological state and the federal democratic evolution of Pakistan, the struggle for which itself was through democratic means. “Pakistan was achieved through the ballot box which is an end in itself and not the means to an end.”

Mr Azfar said Pakistan was the consequence of the 1000-year Muslim civilization of India. The conversion to Islam was not made by the sword but by the mystics. “The concept of Pakistan is not that of an ideological utopia. Indeed a nation state as such has no ideology,” he said. “In the twilight of one century and the dawn of another “we need to be true to our history, to conserve and define the synthesis of our plural society. In our diversity lies our unity. Let us not embark upon the quest for an unattainable utopia but preserve and protect our rich cultural heritage, the Indus Valley Civilization based on social equality, our economy.”

Mr Azfar said the powerful historical and natural forces which — the river Indus, the Urdu language, social equality, the mystical dimension of Islam, the common railway and power grid, the two-party system, one economy — would keep the people together.

“If we preserve the paths of federalism, democracy, tolerance and social equality, if we practise what Data Saheb and Shah Abdul Latif preached, we can yet be the role model as the first Muslim state to come to terms with modernity yet conserve our cultural identity.

Mr Azfar said the concept of Pakistan served to convert a minority into a majority, The demand for the provincial autonomy was raised in order to empower the Muslims in the Muslim majority provinces in the relationship with a federation in which Muslims were in a minority.

He said Pakistan was a product of linguistic nationalism no less than the great religious divide between the two major communal identities of British India. If Islam was the necessary condition of a separate homeland, Urdu was its sufficient condition.

The first occasioned the partition of British India while the second led to the secession of Bangladesh which began with the language movement against the acceptance of Jinnah’s proclamation in Dacca in March 1948 that Urdu and Urdu alone would be the national language of Pakistan, said Mr Azfar.

He said the British replaced Persian with English as the official language but Urdu flourished during the Raj and, in the epoch, following the siege of Delhi and the liberation of the Punjab from the Sikh rule, Lahore became the principal centre for the printed word in Urdu. “Urdu is the symbol of the Muslim renaissance and Pakistan gave it a habitation and a name,” he said.

Mr Azfar said this digression was necessary in order to illustrate that apart from religion, Urdu satisfied the test of linguistic nationalism as the key stone of a modern nation state.

He said in his early writings Allama Iqbal appeared to be an Indian nationalist but in his poem, The Millat, he displayed his conversion to Muslim separatism. His thoughts had crystallized by 1930. He said the Muslim League won the 1945 elections on the issue of Pakistan, and was given a clear verdict in favour of the new country.

Former adviser to the president M P Bhandara said the concept of Pakistan was liable to change which was constant. He said utopia was a mirage and a dangerous thing. The 20th century was a period of utopia and the penalty paid for following it by the USSR and other countries was very severe.

Mr Bhandara said having experimented with staticism, socialism, sectarianism and fiscal scandalism in the respective regimes of Ayub Khan, Z A Bhutto, Ziaul Haq and the Bhutto-Sharif regimes which have led to unmitigated disasters, unwanted wars and unremitting poverty for the weak and fortunes abroad for the powerful, “why not give the vision of our own Quaid-i-Azam a chance to affirm the culture and concept of our politics.”

He said the democratic politics should not be equated with economic plunder and the rulers must be accountable during their time in power and not after periodic coup d’etats. Politicians in power could only be accountable if the institution of accountability was as strong as the institution of rulership.

Mr Bhandara said democracy should neither mean chaos nor rubber stamp parliaments. The money element should be taken out of elections which could be held under the proportionate representation system.

He said the party state should give mandatory representation to women and minorities, eliminating, therefore, the detestable separate electorate for minorities.

“Bring the constitution in line with the most important of the Quaid-i-Azam’s injunctions — you may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state. Let’s dethrone our Quaid’s pictures from walls and TV clips and give his concept of Pakistan a life today,” he said.