PESHAWAR - Former PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar said that Pashtuns suffered the most grievously due to the state policy of building jihadi infrastructure to advance its ‘dubious’ security and foreign policy objectives and called for listening to the demands of Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement to avoid a national disaster in the making.

He said this while addressing a ceremony held in Peshawar Press Club to award journalists for their outstanding works. The ceremony was held to mark the 4rth death anniversary of Lala Amir Siddiqui, a founding member of the Peshawar Press Club and the Khyber Union of Journalists.

He said that Pashtuns suffered incalculably during the past 3 decades. Used as cannon fodder, they were killed and maimed on both sides of the border, forcibly evicted from their homes; their homes and livelihood devastated, children orphaned, women widowed and now humiliated at check posts in the name of security and their land is studded with landmines, he said. They have been victims of brutalities of both state and non-state actors. Never in the past a community had been so brutalised and for so long, he said.

They have faced economic disaster. Trade with Afghanistan has come down from $3 billion a year to about $1billion a year as, he said, Pakistan employed Afghan trade as a tool of advancing foreign and security policy agendas. Our trucks are not allowed inside Afghanistan because we do not permit Afghan trucks to carry Indian goods from Wagah to their country, he said, adding that the practice only suffered Pashtuns.

Afghanistan is turning more and more towards Chahbahar and we are brandishing nuclear weapons to project state power beyond our borders, he said. He said that it was no surprise that the voice of the Pashtuns was not being heard as there was no big national media house owned by anyone from the region.

However, this gap is being filled by committed and competent journalists and movements like the PTM that looks giving voice to the muted turbulence of Pashtuns spirit. Paying tributes to late Lala Amir Siddiqui, he said that he stood at the apex of news paper distribution network in the province.

Without Lala, the printed words of newspapers will not have reached far and wide in the province, he said. Words have divine attributes; they are the tools to transfer knowledge and wisdom from generation to generation, he said. Lala played a critical role in spreading wisdom and knowledge contained in the words printed in newspapers. We lean on words to convey our hopes and dreams, he said, adding, “I too have dreams which I wish to convey to you through the medium of words”.

It is our dream that the state within state comes to an end and the people are enabled to exercise their free will, he said. We dream that 18th Amendment and provincial autonomy will not be rolled back. We dream that judges will be respected not because of fear of the contempt law but because of reverence for their wisdom, sagacity and interpretation of the Constitution and the law, he said.

We dream that private jihad as instrument of state policy will be abandoned and our hearth and homes will not be destroyed, he said.

Narratives are made up of words and have tremendous power and significance, he said.

The challenge of our time is to correct the narrative. Building counter narrative requires intellectual infrastructure based on academic freedom, tolerance for dissent, plurality and critical thinking and asked young journalists to help create through writings this new intellectual infrastructure without fear or favour, he said.