The institutional decay and moral decline that is so very evident in each and every walk of life in Pakistan today is responsible for having turned Pakistan into a weak state, making it a painfully vulnerable and a vassal state.
These observations were made by Nargis Rehman, chairperson, Pakistan Women’s Foundation for Peace (PWFP), while presiding over a seminar, titled “Saving an ailing state from the curse of lawlessness”, at a hotel on Saturday afternoon.
“Citizens take their cue from the rich and the powerful and indulge in illegal and dishonest practices (like selling fake or adulterated goods, bribing officialdom for their dishonest deeds, stealing water and electricity). Our objective is to create a social network powerful enough to create a drive to pressurise change,” she said.
Justice (retd) Shaiq Usmani said that lawlessness was to be found in every sphere of life in our society. “If you have power, there is no law for you. Everyone is an outlaw,” he said.
“Laws will have to be such that they are acceptable to society,” he said. Parliament, he said, was vested with the responsibility of framing laws and it was incumbent on parliamentarians to frame laws by deeply analysing the mores and cultures of a society and ensure built-in safeguards.
As for the enforcement of law, he said that the police were incompetent, inefficient and corrupt. “A person who holds power should set an example,” he said, adding that enforcement of traffic rules would cultivate the habit of law-abiding.
Noted human rights lawyer and social activist Advocate Zia Awan said that the judiciary was not impartial. “You can control monetary corruption but you cannot control intellectual corruption,” he said.
He said that the court’s orders in the case of the kidnapping of two girls had not been complied with by police. Awan lamented that there was no social justice. He said that one had to grease the palms of officials at every step to get a case file moving.
Accountability, he said, was a must when it came to the judiciary and the armed forces.
Article 9 of the Constitution of Pakistan, he said, guaranteed every citizen the right to life and yet we were seeing killings on such a scale.
Noted TV journalist Mazhar Abbas said that our biggest drawback was capacity and capabilities. Quoting an example, he said that none knew anything about Uzair Baloch till 2002. His father was murdered and the murderers were supported by police. This was what caused his association with a crime gang.
This problem, he said, did not exist till the decade of the 1970s. After that came in the money culture, the drug culture because of easy money, and things began to rot. Syndicates, he said, involved politicians, police and other departments.
The mockery of justice, he said, began in the Musharraf era. He said that since 1986, over 80,000 unidentified bodies had been buried in the Edhi graveyard.
Lt-Gen (retd) Moinuddin Haider, former governor of Sindh, was visibly irked by the stance of the speakers preceding him which he construed as pessimism and asked speakers who had dubbed Pakistan an unsafe country, “Are Iraq and Syria less dangerous?” He rejected the statistics speakers had quoted earlier about Pakistan being 147th out of a total of 188 countries surveyed, as regards the human development Index and 48th on the list of global good governance out of a total of 53 countries surveyed, he said that these figures were “all nonsense”.
A former Judge of the Supreme Court, chief justice of the Federal Shariat Court and former ombudsman Justice Haziqul Khairi said that Pakistan’s biggest misfortune was the advent of the martial law era and the clamping of martial law in October 1958.
He decried the shifting of the federal capital from Karachi to Islamabad most arbitrarily. Then, he blamed Ayub Khan for the building of the 20 super-rich capitalist families which laid the foundation of corruption. “It was a real misfortune, he said, that Ayub Khan dismissed 250 seasoned senior bureaucrats, and later 300 by Yahyha, and then 13,00 by Bhutto.
Musharraf’s biggest blunder, he said, was that he tampered with the judiciary. He dismissed 104 Judges, thus creating a vacuum, he said.
He lamented that despite Pakistan being an agricultural country, there was no tax on agricultural income. Thus, the feudals were having a ball of a time and the country was bankrupt. He said that there were 80,000 madrasas in Pakistan.
Dr Sabiha Akhlaque, Rehana Afroze and Nuzra Jamal, all three of them, stressed the upbringing of children and imbibing in them the virtues of honesty and religious teachings. This, they thought, would in due time, bring about a more honest, a more ideal society.
