ISLAMABAD, July 15: World Punjabi Congress (WPC) chairman Fakhar Zaman on Friday voiced his disgust with what he described as a shallow “remix” of literature now generally being produced in Pakistan and urged writers to use their pen as a weapon for social change. At an evening arranged in his honour by the local WPC chapter and some other literary organisations of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, he pleaded to writers not to marginalise themselves by sitting on the periphery and join the mainstream to fight against the status quo.

Several noted writers and Senator Farhatullah Babar of the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) showered praise on Mr Zaman for his role as a “resistance writer”, an advocate of peace with neighbouring India and a champion of the Punjabi language that his WPC seeks to promote.

Conformists cannot be good writers, who must be progressive, enlightened, anti-establishment and eager to “revolt against the system”, Mr Zaman said while quoting the example of Chilean revolutionary poet Pablo Naruda.

“A writer has to fight...fight with pen and, if the situation gets more dangerous, even with sword,” he said, again citing instances from history of literary giants took up arms in support of right causes, as done by English poet Lord Byron in Greece and American novelist Ernest Hemingway in Spain.

The role of a writer, he said, should basically be of a person who regarded literature as a weapon for social change. “A writer has to protest,... pose questions,... stand up against extremism, fundamentalism, mullaism... and then you have to revolt,” he said about the qualities of good writers.

“Contentment is fraud, it amounts to befooling people,” he said, adding: “A writer has to be an idealist. Discontentment is his destiny.”

Mr Zaman said there was “no no-man’s land between truth and falsehood” and that a writer must oppose falsehood. “If he doesn’t do it, I don’t recognise him as a writer.”

He lamented what he called a lack of originality in what was generally being written in Pakistan nowadays and said: “Our writers do not read much.... (and) have not come out of the post- existentialism” era.

This is remix,” he said about the present-day literary works in general and added: “This must change.”

While talking about WPC’s role as a seeker of peace between India and Pakistan, Mr Zaman said he and his colleagues stood vindicated about their peace goals — once greeted with charges of they being communists and traitors — had been supported by the general public and adopted by “the establishment”.

But he said the process should not be allowed to be subverted by what he called “various visible and invisible agencies” seeking to do it.

He repeated his demand for an abolition of visa or introduction multiple visa for travel between India and Pakistan.

While all other speakers praised Mr Zaman’s qualities as a writer, poet, political activist and an organiser, Senator Babar asked writers’ to stand up against what he saw as dangers to liberal thought from the controversial Hasba Bill passed by the North West Frontier Province assembly on Thursday and now challenged by the Federal government before the Supreme Court.

If it were not done, Pakistanis could the fate of Germans under the Nazis, he warned the gathering as he recalled a German poet’s lament about the agony suffered by his country’s intellectuals for not raising their voice against Nazi atrocities.

“I tell you they will come for you and there will be nobody to speak up,” he said about the possible consequences of not resisting moves to curtail freedoms of citizens and added: “You have to rise up.”

Pakistan Academy of Letters chairman and poet Iftikhar Arif praised Mr Zaman’s contributions as head of the same organisation in the 1990s when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister, including the translation of the works of Pakistan’s classical poets into all U.N. languages plus Persian and said there was “no contradiction” in the WPC chief championing the cause of Punjabi language — which sometimes raised eyebrows of some Urdu writers.

“Every Pakistani will love the other Pakistani (and in the same way) whoever speaks any language will like the languages spoken in other parts of Pakistan,” he said. “Anybody not doing this will create distances within Pakistan and be a hurdle in the way of relationships.”

Mr Zaman too referred to his role as WPC chief and said demanding what was the right of one’s mother tongue did not mean opposition to any other language.

“Languages promote rather than break relationships,” he said.

Other writers who spoke included educationist and columnist Prof Khwaja M. Masud, fiction writer Mohammad Mansha Yad and Dr Inamul Haq Javed. National Language Authority chairman Prof Fateh Mohammad Malik sent a brief speech to be read on his behalf as organizers said he had undergone an eye operation.