SHAFAQNA PAKISTAN (Shia News Agency)
After a hiatus of seven year, Pakistan celebrated Pakistan’s day. March 23 is a significant date for Pakistan in two respects. In 1940 on this date, the All-India Muslim League moved a resolution in its annual session in Lahore that demanded the establishment of a separate homeland for the Muslims of British India. This substituted the Muslim League’s earlier demand for constitutional guarantees in a federal system for the protection and advancement of Muslim identity, rights and interests.
If Pakistani nation look back, today Pakistan today finds itself in turmoil. The security nightmare which has grown steadily since 2001 haunts us, and determines much about the lives we lead. In cities across the country, children go to school in buildings lined with barbed wire and barricaded with sandbags. This is the aftermath of the attack by militants on the Army Public School in Peshawar in December 2014, in which at least 141 people, including 132 children, died. Despite the anti-terrorism measures agreed on by all mainstream political parties following this, militancy lives on, with 15 killed and more than 70 injured in blasts at two Lahore churches just over a week ago. Lawlessness was further highlighted by the burning of two men by a mob after this.
If March 23 means anything, it means liberating ourselves from the delusions that we have nursed so far and seeking to build a more modest but a more durable identity for ourselves. It is the strength of our political institutions and our economy that will determine the respect we get from our own people and the international community. This strength can come only through consensus, and no better way has yet been found to arrive at a consensus than free and fair elections. We must be honest about them, and they must be transparent for all to see. Electoral engineering has been tried before by both politicians and military rulers; it has only led to greater chaos. This is a critical time for Pakistan. But when have times not been critical for Pakistan? We must overcome these problems and unravel the knots which tie them together, with extremism linked in to the illiteracy and poverty, inflation to the failures of governance and our institutional crises as a state to the instabilities in our democratic system. The nation needs to come together to achieve this and perhaps, put a new resolution in place.
pakistan.shafaqna.com
