KARACHI: Senate Chairman Mian Raza Rabbani said on Saturday that plans from certain quarters to roll back the historic 18th Amendment to the Constitution had not yet subsided and dangers were still there to haunt the fragile democratic order.

“The ruling elite’s mindset does not allow sharing resources and powers. They want to keep all resources and powers with themselves,” said Mr Rabbani while speaking at a session on the second day of the Sindh Literature Festival.

The session titled ‘Whose state is this?’ was moderated by Aijaz Mangi and Javed Qazi.

The senate chairman said certain powerful quarters were adamant to roll back the 18th Amendment, which made broader provincial autonomy possible and brought the federation back to its true spirit.

He said the political culture in the country was still highly perplexed where debate still raged on whether Pakistan should have a presidential system or a parliamentary one.

“The parliamentary system is a must in a federation. There are still shortfalls in our system, which are to be taken care of.”

He said the next elections should be held on time, which would help the democratic order to run effectively, or, it would deal a serious blow to the federation.

Mr Rabbani said when political parties shunned their ideologies, lost their faith in the power of the people, and opted for ‘electables’, it inflicted a huge harm to the whole system.

“If political parties set their sole criterion to win through strong candidates in elections, they will benefit the establishment and the winning individuals. These electables have tangible connections with all the wings of the establishment and once they win elections, they no longer follow a party’s discipline and sway [towards] the side where the wind blows.”

Warns of persisting dangers to 18th Amendment

He said ‘institutions’ in the country had never accepted themselves subservient to the civilians. Parliament would always try to assert itself.

Mr Rabbani, the lead author of the 18th Amendment, said in the momentous legislation, they had tried to particularly make Article 6 of the Constitution “all encompassing” to stop any future assault on the democratic system, though it was not enough.

“Despite all this,” he said, “we could not succeed in taking [retired general Pervez] Musharraf to court.”

He said political awareness was a must to strengthen civilian authority; extra-constitutional actions should be questioned and political parties should reclaim the ideologies they had long discarded.

“The political parties should also be transparent in all respects. Similarly, parliament, on the whole, should make itself transparent and will have to work hard to make people believe in them. They will have to create a sense of ownership in the people in the political order.”

He said the culture of political workers had almost finished. He called the influential political individuals as ‘sky labs’ whose entry into the political parties had frustrated the workers.

“These sky labs ignored the workers and bended the ideologies of the parties. Besides, the state depoliticised the people and fanned extremism, which gravely harmed political workers.”

Idea of Pakistan

Scientist and intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy in another session said the founding fathers of the country could not give clear guidelines and take historic decisions for the way forward, which harmed the country later.

The session was called ‘The idea of Pakistan: What it was in 1947 and what it should be now’, which was moderated by Abdul Hafeez Jamali.

He said it was not clear before and right after the creation of Pakistan whether it should be an Islamic state or a state for Muslims. Besides, he added, there was no advance strategy vis-à-vis the future of feudalism and a plain role for the military.

He said on the one side, the founding fathers of Pakistan could not take historic decisions, and, on the other, in India, Jawaharlal Nehru made the country secular, entrenched democratic order and put the country on the path of progress.

He claimed the two-nation theory met its end with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, and soon “we’ll have to accept that many and not two nations live in our own country”.

He said most nations in the world were surviving on having no ideology and they were “normal” countries with issues that they settled through dialogue.

“Pakistan should have been a normal country where citizens are not differentiated against for having different faiths, sects or ethnicities.”

Session on media

Speakers at a session on the media, moderated by Wusatullah Khan, spoke on various aspects of the electronic media, most of which had negative connotations.

Geo TV’s anchorperson Hamid Mir said Urdu media could not be called a national media until the national language got integrated with other major languages of the country.

He said there were various no-go areas physically, while there were ones in which most journalists feared to tread. He called the TV rankings as a farce which almost always ignored the common man.

Azhar Abbas of Geo News said news channels showed what society reflected.

However, Mr Mir said the media should not be what it presently was. He said ratings were well controlled with the intention to keep the anchors away from real issues.

Journalist Amir Khakwani said the media had grown into a monster, which did not reflect society’s true picture.

KTN’s Ashfaq Azar said Sindhi news channels were different than their Urdu counterparts as the former focused on mainstream problems of Sindh.

Mai Kolachi Waro Karachi

In the session on Karachi’s history, moderated by journalist Qazi Asif, historian Gul Hasan Kalmati said the city suffered from ethnic, religious and sectarian divide, which its pre-partition history did not show.

“A woman would run a great tavern somewhere here during the Soomra dynasty, yet, she found no intimidation then though that era too had religious issues,” he said.

Writer Madad Ali Sindhi said Jews would live peacefully in Garden East and elsewhere in the city. Hindus, Parsis and Muslims chipped in to make it a beautiful city.

He said no Hindus had migrated till January 1948 until “planned violence” was triggered to force them to flee to India from Karachi, Hyderabad and other cities of Sindh.

Former administrator of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation Fahim Zaman Khan said Bandar Road (now M.A. Jinnah Road) was made in 1915 for which its planner was questioned why he had constructed that wide a road.

“That was the vision. After a century this road still serves us.”

He said lands from the sea were being reclaimed and unlawfully being occupied by the Karachi Port Trust or the Defence Housing Authority instead of the Board of Revenue, Sindh.

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2017