documentary
and photographs' exhibition Hum Sab Ayodha in Nisar Osmani Auditorium,
Press Club on Jan 25-27, 1999.
The purpose was to apprise Pakistani media people of how the secular and anti-fundamentalist forces have resisted forces of extreme in India. It is not the one sided story of Bal Thakreys as presented by our right wing sections of press. This exhibition is based on a research on Ayodhya and Babri Mosque, tracing that there was no birth place of Ram at the place.
The photograph panels also contain brief history of the place. This exhibition was first displayed simultaneously in 17 major cities of India in August 1993 in the frenzied post-Babri mosque demolition period. Cases were registered against SAHMAT; some of them still continue, yet this group of artists, media persons and intellectuals take their independent position to let the people know that only secular and free model could serve India as a pluralistic society.
The documentary film 'Ek Khubsoorat Jahaz' (Dir. Gauhar Reza) was about the disaster nuclear weapons have brought about earlier and the lethal potential that they carry today. The documentary revealed that where the population of the world had only doubled in the last five decades, the devastation capacity of the nuclear weapons have increased 50 thousand times.
While
talking on the inaugural session of the exhibition, Dr Mehdi Hassan, a
renowned journalist and academician, said that Pakistan and India can maintain
friendly ties despite having different cultures, languages, religions and
societies. He said that better relations between India and Pakistan were
surely in the larger interest of people living in either side of the fence.
He said that the retaliation of the Indian liberals against the demolition of the Babri Mosque was owing to the fact that the democratic tradition of the India was endangered by this action of the Hindu fundamentalists.
Earlier, former Chief Executive Mashriq, Aziz Mazhar, told the audience about the visit of a seven member delegation of Journalists Resource Centre to India which participated in the SAHMAT's convention on secularism, held in New Delhi, December 1998.
Earlier, the activist of SAHMAT India, Arindam Dutta, briefed about the exhibition and elaborated view of the SAHMAT and like-minded groups which include the core of Indian intelligentsia.
Hum
Sab Ayodha was also later exhibited on Feb -13, 1999 at the Sustainable
Development Policy Institute (Islamabad) and Christians Study Centre Rawalpindi
with collaboration of the Citizens Peace Committee, Islamabad. In the words
of a participant: "SAHMAT, after watching the movies, I feel comfortable
to say, is one of those initiatives which are not taking secularism as
part of "intellectual discourse" but a feeling, a pattern, a way of thinking
deeply embedded in the civilizational treatment of the sub-continent with
an accommodative secularism."
