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[[Category: India |M]]
[[Category: History |M]]
[[Category:Name|Alphabet]]
[[Category:Name|Alphabet]]

=Mobashir Hassan=

By Professor Bhabani Sen Gupta

'' India Harmony '' VOLUME - 1 : ISSUE - 5 JULY-AUGUST, 2012

'' Mobashir Hassan belonged to the other eminent family of scholars from Panipat.
The family emigrated to Pakistan but maintained close links with India. He has
spent a lifetime trying to improve Indo-Pak relations. ''

Man creates history even as history creates man.
The credit for the great boost democracy and the
rule of law received on that sunlit December
morning goes, of course, to the millions of
Pakistanis who kept the flame of democracy alive
and flickering even during long sunless spans of
military rule. There are, however, two outstanding
individuals who luminate the great event of
December 17 which may make another military
takeover much more difficult than the three Army
coups of 1958, 1977 and 1996. One of them is
Iftikar Choudhry, the Chief Justice of Pakistan,
whose determined fight for an independent judiciary
and his final victory have installed him as, perhaps,
the brightest icon of (he country's struggle for
democracy- Chief Justice Choudhury's historic role
found rich consummation in his ability to carry the
entire Bench with him to deliver the great judgment
on December 17.

[[File: Dr. Mobashir Hassan at his home in Lahore.png| Dr. Mobashir Hassan at his home in Lahore|frame|500px]]

The other luminous icon of democracy in Pakistan
is the 87-year old Mobashir Hassan, of Lahore,
who filed the petition at the Supreme Court
challenging the legality of the National
Reconciliation Ordinance and mobilized a team of
competent lawyers, headed by Abdul Latif
Pirzada, also of Lahore, to plead successfully for
the historic verdict. Janab Mobashir Hassan's
birthplace and the soil that first nourished his
personality, his thinking and his commitment is
Panipat in Haryana.

I knew that the Pakistan People's Party was born
in 1969 at Mobashir's house in Lahore and that he
was Finance Minister in the first cabinet of
Zulfikar Ali Bhutlo. I also knew that he did not
agree with ZAB's handling of the turn of events
that ended with the separation of East Pakistan
from Pakistan and its incarnation as Bangladesh.
Mobashir had told me that he stayed on with ZAB
mainly because among the political leaders of
Pakistan he alone was committed to the urban and
rural poor and the lower middle classes.

On one of my visits to Lahore, Mobashir took me
around the city's sprawling slums where lived the
poor; and I saw how the people of these urban
slums loved and respected him. Mobashir used to
enlighten me about the inner dynamics of the
Republic of Pakistan; tell me about the emotional
traumas the Pakistanis had gone through; and
about the basic contradictions of Pakistani society.
He would often talk about the "bleeding sense of
betrayal" the people of Pakistan felt at the three
military coups – how the politicians had let down
the people, and how convinced he was that the
great hiatus between democracy and military
dictatorship was the basic fault line of the State
and Sociely of Pakistan.

Few Pakistani personalities are known to Indians
except in the narrow restricted context of
nationalism and religion, and the mutually
exclusive relationship between what Kuldip Nayar
appropriately described as “distant neighbours”.

Mobashir has been quoted as saying that while he
shared the happiness of the people of Pakistan and
of many other countries with the historic Supreme
Court verdict, he knew the political system well
enough to doubt if it would lead to a genuine
reordering of the country. “The people of Pakistan
are extremely happy, so I am happy too." he said,
"But since I know the reality, I do not entertain the
hope that this will stop the State of Pakistan from
falling apart." Mobashir hurried to explain that he
believed that when corruption became the System,
the State fell apart.

Mobashir Hassan is a civil engineer who earned his
Ph.D from Columbia University. His own life is an
example for the people of Pakistan who, In their
own way, have been fighting their battles for
democracy and a humane social and economic
order. He belongs, as I also do, to the generation in
the subcontinent that witnessed the end of the
Empire, and the launching of our respective
republics. However, our political systems carry a lot
of the dirt and filth that gathered in the huge belly of
the Empire. India has done relatively well, because
of its democratic political process built on
institutional foundations- It was Pakistan's
misfortune that it lacked strong political institutions
and leadership. From the start, power was usurped
by the bureaucracy. And even in the 1950s, the
ruling bureaucracy joined hands with the Army to
lord it over the political parties and their leaders.

If Mobashir Hassan were a student of history and
took a deep look at the political history of nations
and peoples, he would perhaps be less pessimistic
and share the popular jubilation of the Supreme
Court verdict of December 21. The nations of
Europe took more than a century; fought countless
wars including two World Wars in 25 years; while
enriching themselves from their worldwide empires,
before they attained the mature stability of the last
sixty years. Besides— and this is a matter of
supreme importance—the Europeans slit
themselves into a cluster of countries with small
populations compared with the countries of Asia.
When Asia changes, half of humanity changes.
Even after losing its eastern wing, Pakistan is home
to over 168 million people-the second largest
Muslim country in the world after Indonesia—
while Germany and France, the two most populous
countries of the continent of Europe, have only 82
and 64 million people.

Mobashir Hassan - Revision history

Pdewan: Created page with "{| class="wikitable" |- |colspan="0"| This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.You can help by converting..."

Pdewan: Created page with "{| class="wikitable" |- |colspan="0"|
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.
You can help by converting..."