‘1,000 Ataturks needed to bring Pakistan back on track’
KARACHI: “We are an ailing state, not a failing state,” observed writer and intellectual, former senator and information minister Javed Jabbar during his lecture on ‘Ailing state — evolving nation’ a part of the Aga Khan University’s Sixth Sense Forum lecture series on Tuesday.
“There are religion-based states like Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, Israel, Nepal and Maldives but Pakistan is different,” he said while elaborating that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was actually the country that evolved from a tribe, we don’t have a religious leader in Pakistan like the Pope in the Vatican, Pakistan is not a sacred or promised land like Israel, and we don’t have to be Hindu to be citizens of Nepal or just Sunni Muslims to belong to the Maldives.
“So we are a very peculiar breed. Pakistan was an original thought with acronyms in its name representing the regions meant to be a part of it as well as ‘Land of the pure’ being its meaning. So the idea of Pakistan was original, brilliant,” he paused for a moment, “but flawed,” he completed his sentence. “Some would say that with two portions of the country on either side of a hostile land even Pakistan’s structure was flawed. But the way you could share the ideas and philosophy despite this huge distance in between was fascinating. Pity it didn’t work out,” he regretted.
Going back into the making of the state, Mr Jabbar reminded that Pakistan was an overnight state coming about at 10 weeks’ notice. As history goes, the British were looking to pull out of the region after WWII so they brought in Lord Mountbatten to take care of their little problem with a mandate to do it within 18 months. But Mountbatten had an even quicker fix in the form of independence, take it or leave it.
via ‘1,000 Ataturks needed to bring Pakistan back on track’ – DAWN.COM.
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