Sustainable development conference: 'For peace, reform is a precondition'

ISLAMABAD: The establishment and anti-democtratic forces have not allowed democracy to function. “You can have democracy on paper, but they will rig the elections,” remarked noted economist Kaiser Bengali while speaking on the first day of a conference on “Peace and Sustainable Development in South Asia: The Way Forward,” at a local hotel on Tuesday.

The conference has been organised by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s (SDPI).

Citing the bureaucracy’s repeated obstruction of the NFC Award implementation as an evidence, Bengali said, “The dominant group simply does not want to share power”. He said there was a spirit of cooperation and compromise between the federating units during the negotiations, but in the months following, Islamabad created “one obstruction after another”.

Bengali bemoaned ethnic fragmentation in Pakistan and the failure of the establishment to construct a genuine vision of national identity, arguing that they were instead pursuing personal aggrandizement and a policy of “beating heads” in Balochistan, reminiscent of the Centre’s strategy towards East Pakistan.