Raza Rabbani calls for acros s-the-board accountability

KARACHI: The Senate Chairman, Mian Raza Rabbani, has called for an across-the-board accountability of all segments of bureaucracy and political leadership and said that there should be no sacred cows.
Accountability, he said, should be totally free of the trappings of elitism and political or monetary influence. “Who will subject the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to accountability?” he asked, adding that the civil and military bureaucracy was also not neat and clean.
The NAB, he said, should be thoroughly examined and for that purpose, a supreme national committee comprising the most reputed and respected names in the academia and civil society, should be formed, people whose non-partisan stance and honesty would be beyond reproach. He expressed these views while speaking as the chief guest at a commemorative meeting to remember the late Rana Fatehyab Ali Khan, former chairman, Mazdoor-Kissan Party of Pakistan, at the Federal Urdu University, on Wednesday.
Rabbani said that corruption had permeated each and every segment of the society at the micro level and there were virtually none who had escaped its dragnet. Corruption, he said, was gnawing into the very vitals of the society. He said corruption was a harsh reality in Pakistan’s set-up and no section was immune to it.
The Senate chairman, also a senior leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), reminded the participants that he, as the chairman of the Upper House of Parliament, did not represent just the PPP but all the parliamentarians and said that singling out any single section for corruption was not only inappropriate but could also have grave implications.
Rabbani said special courts must also be established to try all those who had indulged in corruption and wrongdoings without fear or favour. He said if one politician was tried in a special court, then all others should also be tried in the same courts irrespective of their rank or status.
He took a swipe at the those who were tampering with history and the curricula. “Ideals postulated by our elders are not being passed on to the young generation because our curricula were ruined, in particular, by the Zia regime, when history was tailored to glorify just groups of usurpers and vested interests. People’s struggles and democratic movements were just eliminated from the curricula with the result that today the young generation are not at all acquainted with the actual history of the nation for which the elders made untold sacrifices,” Rabbani said. He said that so many facts of our history that highlighted the struggles of the masses for the progress of the country had been eliminated from the textbooks and in this regard, he particularly highlighted the democratic struggle spearheaded by Rana Fatehyab and his comrades for the restoration of genuine democracy and empowerment of the man on the street.
“Fatehyab’s life was a story of struggle, struggle not for oneself, but for noble ideals, for emancipation of workers, peasants, and the Federation of Pakistan,” he said.
In the process, he said, he had to face incarceration but still he never compromised on his principles. “Fatehyab never abandoned the path of truth and it was because of him and his associates that today we had a semblance of democracy in Pakistan,” Rabbani said.
Unfortunately, he said, the ideals of the likes of Rana Fatehyab had not been passed on to the younger generation.
Masooma Hassan, the widow of Rana Fatehyab, and chairperson Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA), and also former ambassador to Austria, spoke in the most nostalgic and tender tone about her late husband. In a visibly touching tone, she recalled her companionship of 50 years with her husband and recounted his qualities of head and heart.
“Fatehyab always suffered in his political life but never compromised on principles,” she said. The MRD Movement, she said, was the zenith of his political life. Her husband, she said, was a very brave person and never wilted under political or dictatorial pressure.
She pointed out another quality in him which, she said, was rare to come by and that was he never switched allegiances or parties. She said that Fatehyab started off his career with the Pakistan Workers Party and when the party was merged into the MKP, he remained part of it till his death.