Pakistan has not been able to learn anything from the secession of East Pakistan as it still continues to follow the same policies and methods that led to the country’s disintegration on 16 December 1971, particularly the unequal distribution of resources and authoritarian as well as repressive attitude towards ethnolinguistic diversity in the country.
The country also needs to recover funds of billions of rupees meant for the repatriation of stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh, that lie in the Habib Bank Limited and had been frozen by the United States over allegations of terror financing after 9/11.
These view were expressed by speakers at a seminar titled “The East Pakistan tragedy: contemporary concerns,” organised by the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA) at its library here on Saturday.
Speaking on the occasion, PIIA chairperson Dr Masuma Hasan said the separation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan was a monumental catastrophe which happened due to various factors that had accumulated over the past many years and that the effects of that tragedy had lingered on till this time.
Addressing the key issues that led to the separation of East Pakistan, Executive Director of Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi Dr S. Akbar Zaidi said the country was doomed from the beginning as West Pakistan had prejudice and racism against Bengalis.
They were looked down upon on the basis of colour and height and were kept marginalised, he added.
Dr Moonis Ahmar, meritorious professor at the department of International Relations and former dean faculty of social sciences at the University of Karachi, highlighted the plight of stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh, who are languishing in camps for decades.
He said there were 66 camps in Bangladesh where thousands of ‘forgotten’ Pakistanis were living in a poor condition for the past 52 years as Pakistan had failed to repatriate them.
He said efforts had been made to bring them back but those efforts were not successful. In 1988, the government of Pakistan took an important step and established a fund for the repatriation and rehabilitation of the stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh with the help of The Muslim World League, an international Islamic NGO, Dr Ahmar said.
However, that process was stopped and the fund of millions of rupees — now in the Habib Bank Limited and has multiplied over the years into billions of rupees — was frozen by the United States over allegations that it would allegedly be used in terror financing, he added.
He said the people stranded there also complained that Pakistan accepted millions of Afghan as well as Bengali refugees, but they, the loyal Pakistanis, remained forgotten.
The way out now was that the frozen funds be taken out and utilised to repatriate the stranded Pakistanis, or, if that’s not possible, to help them provide an honourable way of living in Bangladesh with equal rights and citizenship, Dr Ahmar suggested.
Addressing fault lines in Pakistan’s nation building experiment, Dr Farhan Hanif Siddiqi, director and associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, Quaid-i-Azam University, said nation building was mostly seen and practiced in Pakistan, as was many other countries, as manufacturing homogeneity, or unity, through hegemonic practices, in which cultures, myths, symbols, and histories were manufactured with the intention of homogenising social and ethnic diversity in the service of nation building. He said:
But this is where the problem lies because ethnic identities and social diversity are denied and suppressed in such hegemonic practices.
He added that all this had been happening in Pakistan since its inception and contributed mainly to its disintegration.
Therefore, he said, Pakistan needed to normalise diversity, multilingualism and multiculturalism and it was high time that these problems were addressed.
He said it was very important for a country to be self-reflecting and self-critical for the purpose of nation building but such was not the case with Pakistan as the political leaders and establishment of the country always shifted the blame onto others and never accepted criticism.
Dr Farhan also said that in Pakistan, the issue of majoritarianism had also become a major challenge where the majority was afraid of monitories and tried to keep them suppressed.
Zafar Shafique, member of the council of PIIA and CEO of Paradise International Group of Companies, discussed the economic effects on companies, institutes and people after the fall of Dhaka.
He said Pakistan faced various economic problems after the secession. There was industrial and economic disruption, loss of employment and termination of international contracts, all resulting in severe loss of profit.
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