People foresee welfare state

Self-seekers might have forgotten the October 08, 2005 earthquake but suffering people remember to this day the disaster and painful social and economic effects on human life it caused.

“Who came to our rescue we know it, only the common man and military men who fear Almighty God,” say many victims of Islamabad, Balakot and Muzaffarabad. The point is that people have in fact changed their viewpoint. They call it ‘dirty politics’ in which are engaged ‘leaders of self-interest’. Citizens want a leader who should be dedicated like the Quaid-i-Azam to the cause of the downtrodden, and promote the motto of faith, unity and discipline to attain progress and prosperity for the nation. Similarly, students say the Quaid had envisioned a well-defended sovereign state. How well he told the Constituent Assembly the first duty of a government was to maintain law and order, “so that the life, property and religious belief of its subjects are fully protected by the state?”

By the way, the founder of Pakistan believed in Islamic principles and democracy and advocated the cause of Pakistan and its people. The use of the Islamic idiom was not limited to confrontational situations involving India but extended to domestic reconstruction.

Educated unemployed youths say they too visualize a welfare state. They ask: Didn’t the Quaid conceive Pakistan based on the foundations of social justice and Islamic socialism, which stress equality and brotherhood of man? Was he not concerned with the problem of poverty and backwardness among Muslim masses for the eradication of which they looked, on the one hand, to the urges of dynamism, struggle and creativity in Islam and, on the other, to the Islamic principle of justice?

—zasarwar@hotmail.com