Islamabad: Even though Pakistan became an independent nation on August 14, 1947, basic contradictions around Pakistan’s national identity, resources, representation and ties with neighbouring nations remain acute as they were in 1947 even after 79 years, a report has said.
Pakistan virtually has no representative institutions operational, and its unelected state apparatuses use resources in peripheral regions. Regime ideologues make plans to replace existing provinces with new administrative units while making rhetorical statements regarding sardars and nawabs who deprive their people, political activist Aasim Sajjad Akhtar wrote in leading Pakistani daily Dawn.
He mentioned that, in Pakistan, a militarised ruling class does not share power with even the elites of the historical peripheries and faces problems in keeping a pliant regime in power for a few years before ousting the incumbent government and replacing it with another.
Pakistani authorities have enforced a rinse-and-repeat project on the peripheries and people who have been suffering in the country. The authorities use oppression and exploitation under the guise of ending foreign conspiracy. However, the ‘enemies’ within Pakistan have increased over time, demonstrating a decrepit system kept functional by small-minded rulers who only want to have power and wealth while young people in the country are deprived of basic human needs and liberties.
“What, then, are the prospects for resolution of Pakistan’s tortured national question? Not high, but there are still many in our midst who continue the struggle for genuine decolonisation. It will be a tall order to create the conditions for it, but we need a plurinational social contract that treats all of Pakistan’s constituent peoples as equals. Resources bequeathed to us by nature must be used to meet the needs of all, including future generations. And there must be peace with our neighbours,” Akhtar wrote in Dawn.
Last month, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said that the country’s current governance system has collapsed and is unable to resolve the issues faced by the country, local media reported.
In his address at the Pakistan Economic Summit, Naqvi called for talks among political parties to introduce reforms in the current governance system and proposed the creation of new provinces and bringing administrative reforms.
“The system we are living under has collapsed. Problems cannot be solved through it,” Dawn quoted Naqvi as saying.
He said that Pakistan will continue to discuss the same issues even after 10 years if this system continues and stressed that a reset was important. Naqvi said that the “failed system” had continued in Pakistan for 70 years. He mentioned that Pakistan has been importing wheat despite being an agricultural nation, Dawn reported.
(IANS)
