KARACHI: Regional and global factors beyond Pakistan’s control will impact us in the future but we are principally responsible for our future regardless of external factors. We are going to build our country without a messiah, and it has to be a collective effort.

This was advocated by eminent media commentator and former minister for information Javed Jabbar in a lecture titled ‘2047 — 100 years of Pakistan: ideas and ideals’ in the seminar room in Amn Building, Institute of Business Administration (IBA), on Tuesday.

Giving the presentation’s background, Mr Jabbar briefly spoke on the two related lectures in the series held earlier this year. The first one was ‘1947, birth of another kind’. Defining that he said no nation-state had come into being with the factors that created Pakistan. The second was ‘1971: why did the dream become a nightmare?’. In that context he told the audience, largely IBA students, Pakistan was the first nation-state to disintegrate after WWII.

Disapproving of the word ‘partition’ often used to describe the division of India in 1947, Mr Jabbar said it was an injustice to Pakistan, because India was a region comprising 560 princely states — Hyderabad Deccan was larger than France. It was, he argued, the partition of two provinces — Bengal and Punjab —that had taken place. He said his lecture was not about any predictions; rather it was about possibilities and proposals.

Mr Jabbar then mentioned the pluses and minuses of Pakistan. He claimed there were many pluses, foremost of which were the people of the country, its land, its location, its resources and Pakistaniat. Touching upon the last aspect, Pakistaniat, he said there’s a sense of being Pakistani in each one of us as we’re a collective, nationalistic, single nation. To validate his point, he gave the example of cricket matches where every Pakistani would root for their team. On a political level, however, we needed to be more integrated and cohesive, he cautioned, but maintained that we were an evolving nation. He said he was a migrant but he had never felt Indian. “This is Pakistaniat,” he enthused.

Highlighting the minuses, Mr Jabbar pointed out exclusivism, mis-education, weaponisation and mis-governance. Expanding on exclusivism, he said 97 per cent of Pakistan’s population was Muslim and yet we feared the remaining three per cent, having provisions in the Constitution such as no non-Muslim could become prime minister or president of the country. “This paranoia about non-Muslims is a terrible thing,” he said.

With reference to mis-education, he said there were different estimates that how many children didn’t go to school; some suggested there were 20 million of them. Also, the kind of education imparted to children in government schools left much to be desired. On weaponisation, he said he grieved for Waheedur Rehman who was recently killed by assailants. And mis-governance involved issues such as corruption and nepotism, he said, and added to the list of problems matters of unemployment, ecological cost and healthcare.

Mr Jabbar then shifted the focus of the presentation to his ‘aspiration’ which was: to be a stable, peaceful, prosperous, well-educated country, well-governed and well-regarded across the world. This made him discuss the possible options that could lead us to that path. The first one was to continue with the present system with minimum deviation from a four-province federation. “Winning candidate must get 50 per cent votes in a halqa,” he commented while talking about the first-past-the-post system. Some of the other options were to have gradual, incremental changes after general elections; major ideological, psychological, structural and radical changes; end segmentation; and invigorate ijtihad etc.

Some of the many proposals Mr Jabbar gave were: voting should be made compulsory to make democracy truly representative; to bring a directly elected presidency to begin a new era of integration; to have a collective rotating presidency (like it is in Switzerland) and do away with “charisma”; to have a directly elected senate to give all four provinces equal financial power; to give local government elections and institutions priority over federal and provincial elections and institutions; to introduce compulsory military service for at least six months for all fit citizens between ages of 18 and 30; and to have a new kind of leadership that combined popularity with technocratic capability etc. He said all of that was difficult, but not impossible to achieve.

Mr Jabbar concluded by saying that though regional and global factors, for example climate change, beyond Pakistan’s control were going to impact us: “We are principally responsible for our future regardless of external factors.” He said we’re going to build Pakistan without the help of any messiah but “it has to be a collective effort”. Today’s ideas and ideals, he eloquently put, could be made into tomorrow’s realities.

Replying to a question asked by a student, Mr Jabbar said: “Our future will be our history.”

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2015

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