Daily Times:

The writ of the state has been compromised all over Pakistan. We now need to seriously rethink our priorities and decide whether we want to allow this theatre to continue any further

The grand old man of Jinnah’s Pakistan, the unparalleled Ardeshir Cowasjee, died last month. This great secular urban citizen of Pakistan has managed to blaze quite a trail for those who still want to see this country prosper and reclaim Jinnah’s idealism for Pakistan. Unfortunately, there continues to be no realisation of the precipice our deviation from Jinnah’s vision of a secular state has brought us to. Naysayers on both the right and the left continue to bulldose the memory of Mr Jinnah for their own petty self-interests. Cowasjee rescued the idea of Jinnah’s Pakistan from oblivion but, unfortunately, one Cowasjee is not enough to counter the tomes of misrepresentation that have passed for historical works in Pakistan.

One such distorter of history, purveyor of untruths and a platform for unimaginative bigotry is the Nazaria-e-Pakistan Foundation, which was founded by Ghulam Hyder Wayne in 1992 with a partisan agenda and was legitimised through an Act of the provincial assembly in 1997.

…….Movement far more than the self-styled leaders of the Pakistan Movement who do not quite fit Nizami’s myths about history, like Zafrullah Khan, the man who was tasked by Quaid-e-Azam as the Muslim League’s advocate during partition, have no place in the museum. The contributions of leftists to the Pakistan Movement including such men as Mian Iftikharuddin, Daniyal Latifi and Sajjad Zaheer have been brushed under the carpet.

More