KARACHI: Former Senate chairman Senator Raza Rabbani has appealed to the Sindh government to implement the orders of the Sindh High Court under which the Flagstaff House was to house a library, an audiovisual centre and a museum.

He was speaking at the Jinnah Awards ceremony organised by the Jinnah Society at a local hotel on Saturday.

This year’s award was presented to the founding president of SOS Children’s Villages Pakistan Souriya Anwar and artist and social worker Jimmy Engineer.

Talking about the Flagstaff House, Sen Rabbani said that it was taken over by the federal government through an order of the SHC under which it was required to build a library, audiovisual centre and a museum there.

Souriya Anwar and Jimmy Engineer get this year’s Jinnah Awards

None of these facilities, however, could be set up within the historic place, which later went to the provincial government under the 18th Amendment to the Constitution.

“I make a passionate appeal to the government of Sindh to give effect to the order of the Sindh high court. If they can’t do it for whatever reasons that may be, [it should] think of handing it over to the Jinnah Society so they could effect to these three things,” he said.

‘I find Quaid’s Pakistan to be in chains’

Voicing his disappointment over failure of successive governments, both political and military, in implementing the court order related to Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he said the reason might be a deliberate attempt on part of the state to try and put into background things which didn’t suite its agenda.

“And, indeed, if you look at the state agenda from 1947, from what the Quaid had envisaged Pakistan to be, the state agenda has undergone a massive change. I find Quaid’s Pakistan to be in chains,” he said, adding that the Quaid wanted Pakistan to be a welfare state.

Sen Rabbani, who is also a senior leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, also referred to the Quaid’s Aug 11, 1947 speech, and said: “It’s difficult to find it because it speaks of fundamental human rights, minority rights, and what Pakistan must not be; a theocracy. But, this is not what the state had envisaged Pakistan to be after Jinnah’s death. That’s why the Flagstaff House remains without a museum, without a library and an audiovisual centre so people might not know the exact purpose for which Pakistan was made.”

Continuing on the same subject, he pointed out that the three fundamental principles of the Quaid — Unity, Faith and Discipline — had been ‘rearranged’ as Faith, Unity and Discipline, under a government notification dated Jan 11, 1955.

Mentioning another example of how state attempts to change Mr Jinnah’s vision, slogans and speeches, he cited a reproduced letter of the Quaid which stated that the Quaid didn’t favour a parliamentary form of government and that it was only successful in England.

“I become suspicious of the fact that the letter or diary to which allegedly the diary belonged to wasn’t discovered till the Ansari report which came into existence with Ziaul Haq constituting the Ansari commission to give a new form of government,” he said.

According to him, whenever the ruling elite of Pakistan talks about a change it wants to shun two things — provincial autonomy and the parliamentary form of government — both of which, he believed, were dear to Quaid’s heart.

Expressing her gratitude after receiving the award, Ms Souriya Anwar recalled her rewarding experience with the SOS Village Pakistan and how the campaign took off globally after the Second World War and in Pakistan in the 1970s.

“I told my international colleagues that they can guide us but we won’t accept any funding,” she said, adding that the SOS Villages Pakistan had not accepted any international funding since its birth in 1975.

Artist Jimmy Engineer spoke in detail of his creative art work and social activism spread over decades.

He said: “I have told successive governments that don’t rule the people, serve them. If we really want to bring a change, we have work at the grass-root level.”

Ashraf Wathra, Liaquat Merchant and Ameena Saiyid, all representing the Jinnah Society also spoke.

Past recipients of the award were Abdul Sattar Edhi, Hakeem Muhammad Saeed, Graham Layton, Ruth Pfau, Akhter Hameed Khan, Ishrat Hussain, Ahmed Ali Khan, retired Air Marshal Asghar Khan, I. A. Rehman, Adib Rizvi, Imran Khan and Ardeshir Cowasjee.

Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2018