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A Pakistani in Patna with the message of peace |
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Written by Ajay
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Tuesday, 10 March 2009 |
A lone Pakistani in Patna within 48 hours of the Lahore attack on the Sri Lankan players and that too with a crusading mssion. But this jehad was for the peace and not violence.
Famous trade union leader of Pakistan Karamat Ali had a busy schedule on March 5 as he landed for the first time in the state capital with a plea to unitedly fight terrorism and work for peace. In his just ten-hour long trip he addressed a meeting in Patna Women’s College to be followed by one in the History Department of Patna University and Press Conference in Country Club International and finally a meeting in Gandhi Sanghralaya.
Though his visit was planned much earlier––after the deplorable attack of 26/11 in Mumbai––yet he had a regret: actually five members of a delegation was to visit Patna, but in his words “in South Asia a clerk in the visa office of respective countries decide where you should go and where not.” He explained that in all ten members of the India-Pakistan Peace Forum was to visit India to be followed by 15 Indians to Pakistan. Five were to go to North India and other five to South India. But the man in the Indian embassy willed something else. He stamped that nine will go to other place “and only I was allowed to visit Patna. This, notwithstanding the fact that our visit to different cities was cleared by the foreign ministry of India.”
Karamat Ali minced no word to condemn the naked act of terrorism, be it in Mumbai or in Lahoure, and said that it would be absurd to blame India for the latest act. He said the same group is responsible for attack on Mumbai as well as Lahore.
He stressed the need for People-to-People contact in the countries of South Asia and said that like Nirmala Deshpande, who was like his elder sister, he too is a South Asian. Regretting that in South Asian countries a lowly official of the visa office decides who should travel to which place he cited a personal example of his wife. He said that he applied for visa when Inder Kumar Gujral was the foreign minister. However, he could not get even after he became the Prime Minister. It was much later when he met him in one of the Forum meetings that Gujral inquired about the visa. “I replied, no my wife had not got the visa.”
Multan-born Karamat said that there should be South Asian Court of Justice on the pattern of European Union. This court should decide the cases relating to the act of terrorism in the region. However, he regretted that the respective governments are not sincere in their efforts.
Karamat, who was in Lucknow on Wednesday and later flew to Kolkata late on Thursday evening, said that the one lakh citizens of 60 Indian cities and 23,000 Pakistanis of over 36 cities of that counry signed in the signature campaign for peace organized between January 9 and February 18. This shows the intense urge for peace among the common folk.
Be it in the Press conference or in the three speeches he delivered today he made it clear that the poor people of his country, and even that of India, are becoming cannon fodder for the terrorists. Unless the poverty is fought and the root cause not weeded out the region can not actually fight the menace of terrorism.
The left-leaning director of Institute of Labour Research hit out at the liberal economic policy being followed in India. However, he said that in his own country it is impossible for a library to even have any socialist and communist literature. He lamented that Parliament was being by-passed in India and in Pakistan nobody ever bothered for Parliament.
(Acknowledgements: Bihar Times)
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 10 March 2009 )
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