26 October 2004	Tuesday	11 Ramazan 1425

LAHORE, Oct 25: Politician and federal minister Mahmud Ali has said it is wrong to term the Kashmiris' freedom struggle terrorism. He was speaking at a meeting held to remember the Pakistan Movement leaders who had died in the month of October.

The meeting was organized by the Nazaria-i-Pakistan Foundation and the Pakistan Movement Workers Trust here on Monday.

Speakers paid tributes to Khwaja Nazimuddin, Nurul Amin, Raja Sahib of Mahmoodabad, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, Nawab Iftikhar Husain of Mamdot and Mir Ahmad Yar Khan of Kalat.

The minister said the people of Jammu and Kashmir had been fighting for their freedom since its occupation by India 57 years ago, and they could not be called terrorists. They were fighting against a well-equipped Indian army of 700,000 troops. Similarly the people Palestine, Chechnya and other occupied areas were fighting for their freedom. The people of Iraq and Iran were struggling to maintain their freedom. "How can you call them terrorist," he asked. In fact, the terrorists were those who had deployed 140,000 troops in the Middle East and the people of the area were fighting against them. There must be redefinition of the term terrorism, he said.

He said Pakistan was facing a nuclear threat from India and some other nuclear powers that were playing the carrot and the stick with Pakistan.

The minister said: "Pakistan is more an ideological than a geographical entity. Its basis is the ideology of Islam, which is a universal phenomenon. Without ideology, Pakistan can exist just as a geographical unit at the mercy of other powers. The Quaid-i-Azam had accepted the maimed and moth-eaten Pakistan only to enable the Muslims of the sub-continent to have some land to live on. It was not the homeland that the All-India Muslim League had demanded in its Lahore Resolution passed in 1940.

The resolution had not mentioned the provinces, but Muslim majority 'zones' in the north-west and north-east parts of the sub-continent that included besides the present areas of Pakistan the whole of the Punjab, Saharanpur division of the UP in the west and the whole of Assam, Bengal and a part of Bihar in the east."

He said 100 million Muslims of the sub-continent had succeeded in establishing Pakistan. In 1947, the total population of Pakistan was about 35 million that now had gone up to 150 million. They must unite to protect the ideology of Pakistan in the same spirit the 100 million Muslims had struggled for their homeland. "I have a firm belief that no power on earth can deprive Pakistan of its ideology," he asserted. He recalled his association with the Raja of Mahmoodabad who was the president of All-India Muslim Students Federation, and he was the president of the Assam Muslim Students Federation.

He said he had told the Raja that Islam is secular in the sense that it is a religion of tolerance. But the Raja disputed his theory. However, later he had agreed that if secular meant tolerance, Islam is secular.

Other speakers included Begum Afifa Mamdot, Dr Rafiq Ahmad, Khwaja Iftikhar Ahmad, Dr Maskeen Hijazi, Dr M.A. Soofi and Dr. Sarfraz Mirza.