United States (US) policies are not controlled by people but by a powerful cabal of rich families, Punjab University (PU) Vice Chancellor (VC) Prof Dr Mujahid Kamran said addressing a 2-day international conference on “Pakistan: Challenges to Democracy, Governance and National Unity” at Dr Pervaiz Hasan Environmental Law Centre in PU. Dr Mujahid inaugurated the event while international scholars from the United States, Germany, France, Russia, China and Turkey attended the moot besides leading Pakistani academics, PU faculty members and students. In his welcome address, Prof Dr Qalb-i-Abid said that some studies in international academia are painting a bleak picture of Pakistan’s future. He said negative projections should not be taken as an offence but rather responded to with proper planning for the future. He said Pakistan needed to manage its foreign relations, especially with US and India. He said China had been a source of strength and relief. He said luckily the Pakistani media is redefining what should be the appropriate role of the establishment and important institutions in Pakistan’s future.
Media frameworks and the individual: Florida State University School of Communication Director Prof Dr Stephen D. McDowell examined the relationship – symbiotic or ambivalent – between media and individual frames. He highlighted the politico-judicial crisis in Pakistan since 2007 and said media frames had influenced public opinion and subsequently been affected by individual frames in shaping and packaging media content. He said in political communication, media frames were used to influence public opinion in the direction deemed desirable by the communicator. Prof Dr Jean-Luc Racine, a senior research fellow from France, said that beyond strong ideological stands, socio-economic dynamics are at play as well as identity affiliations in Pakistan. He said that more than anything else, the deficit of good governance was probably one of the key factors behind the present challenges Pakistan had to address.
State-society dissonance: Faith University Istanbul Associate Professor Dr Ihsan Yilmaz said that the Pakistani state lacked penetration within society and the inconsistent and unstable legal system had produced unofficial legal pluralism in Pakistan. He said considerable variation in the enforcement and interpretation of the Islamic laws by the courts had intensified the pluralism.
The Indus legacy: Centre for South Asian Studies Paris Prof Dr Michel Boivin focused on how French scholars analysed the challenges to democracy, governance and national unity in Pakistan. He said that French scholars paid attention to the Indus Civilization. He said French archeologists had begun excavations soon after the birth of Pakistan.
Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies Prof Dr Vyacheslav Y. Belokrenitsky said Pakistan had to address the problem of the inefficiency of water use and the capricious power of water, resulting in devastating floods, and the decaying of the irrigation and drainage systems and rapidly growing deforestation which contributed to soil erosion. A silent, social revolution: Lahore University of Management Sciences Prof Dr Rasool Bakhsh Raees said a silent social revolution was taking place in Pakistan. He said the military-centric approach to understanding Pakistan’s democratic dilemma, evades one central question about the past failures of democratic transitions of the country: how democratic were the elected elites who replaced the military regimes? He said democratic regimes legitimised the rule of dominant elites rooted in the tribal, caste and feudal social structures. He said Pakistan’s third democratic transition remained as divorced from democracy as had been the hybrid regimes of the past and the answer for why lay in the social basis of elite and political party power.
Addressing the inaugural session, PU VC Dr Mujahid Kamran urged leaders to develop a consensus to allocate at least four percent of GDP to education and termed lack of education as the root-cause to all problems faced by Pakistan. He said rich US families had divided mankind through repeated deception. He said history bore testament to the fact that these families had funded the Bolshevik Revolution and Hitler simultaneously. The VC said surprisingly, there were 4058 counter terrorism institutions in the US which were functioning contrary to their title and National Security Agency was intercepting 1.7 billion communications. He hoped that the moot will suggest measures to improve Pakistan.
