ISLAMABAD: The second day of ‘Jinnah Institute’s Ideas Conclave 2020’ commenced with a bilateral conversation on ‘Democracy and Inclusion’ between leading experts from Pakistan and India and the participants discussed political tendencies in South Asia, where majoritarianism and populism had begun to change the structures of democracy.
Speakers of the session included former federal minister and leader of Senate opposition, Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Ms Hina Jilani, and prominent Indian journalist and economist Prem Shankar Jha. The session was moderated by senior fellow Tabadlab, Mosharraf Zaidi.
“It is the people themselves who harbour these prejudices; they are displayed in the public domain because an environment of ease has been built by the state,” stated Ms Hina Jilani, pointing towards social and political factors that exclude a large number of people from economic opportunities. “The root cause of divisive thought and fascism has been access to opportunity and dichotomy in language,” she said. Aitzaz Ahsan spoke about the slow decay of freedoms in Pakistani society. “In the last six or seven decades we have allowed society to degenerate to an extent that we cannot leave such a Pakistan to our children.” He suggested that Indian society displays many of Pakistan’s challenges, and the two were remarkably similar in their intolerance and treatment of minorities.
Prem Shankar Jha discussed how voices of majoritarianism had always existed; the only difference was that they were now being used to systematically erode democratic structures. He also elaborated how societies in South Asia created dichotomies based on languages; speaking and writing and English for instance was an intrinsic advantage for greater job opportunities. Those that were left out as a result of these issues were targets for the Hindutva movement as potential recruits. “Do not give up hope on us (India) just yet,” he asked his co-panelists. The second session of the day titled, “Connectography: Making Technology Work for Governance” featured a mix of experts working in the private, development and legal sectors whose work focused on technology.
Director Programmes Jinnah Institute, Salman Zaidi started by mentioning the “historic disruption” occasioned by COVID in 2020, and stated that technology “was no monolith; nor it is inherently good or bad, rather its usage by state and society was a reflection of offline socio-political trends.
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