ISLAMABAD: Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) General (retd) Zubair Mahmood Hayat said on Thursday that Pakistan has to change its narrative in view of rising Hindutva extremism threatening regional peace and security and Hindu nationalists dividing South Asia.
He was speaking during the last session of the Leaders in Islamabad Business Summit titled “Changing Narratives” on the second day. General (retd) Zubair Mahmood Hayat said rewriting the narrative was challenging due to its broad and intricate scope. “The state narrative is a novel concept. There were several depictions and narratives of kingdoms earlier in human history.”
He said there was no positive news coming from our east, where the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and Hindutva ruled the state of India. He claimed that Nehru’s secularism concept was buried in the Hindu Rashtra. He said they saw the second Akhund Bharat at the Indian Assembly’s opening ceremony. The world will forget Russian atrocities, but not India’s brutal violence against innocent Kashmiris and Muslims throughout India.
He continued on to say that in India, if a Muslim kills someone, the story gets viral, but there is no Hindu story. Pakistan requires a narrative shift, in which the narrative trend and its consequences must be changed.
The former CJCSC believed that technology, digitalization, innovation, and women’s rights should be the focus of the narrative since Pakistanis needed to step beyond of their comfort zone and take bold initiatives. He insisted that Pakistan’s situation would not improve with little measures but would require an enormous change. Pakistan must take ownership of the new vision at the political, institutional, and individual levels. He remarked that Hitler illustrated hate speech, whereas Abdul Sattar Edhi showed the human narrative, and Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah represented the national narrative.
