Bilawal critiques govt over digital rights

PPP chief blasts PML-N govt for lacking vision; proposes bill of digital rights

Listen to article

HYDERABAD:

Although Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has been buttressing the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz's (PML-N) government in the centre, it finds the latter's policies shorn of a vision to tackle the menacing problems of climate change and granting digital rights to the citizens.

PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, while addressing the Sindh University's Convocation in Jamshoro on Monday, fired a broadside against the government, urging the youth to throw their weight behind him for securing their digital rights.

"They [the rulers] are afraid that you may end up collectively using the internet [based platforms] and demand your rights," he told the Convocation, after delving to the history lesson, how the rulers over the centuries were trying to control the populace.

"Attempts are under way to control and censor the country's digital landscape," he warned, as he referred to the recent problems like slowing down of the internet speed and blockade of the virtual private networks (VPNs).

The PPP chairman said that the bandwidth, fibre-optic cables and wireless internet services served as the modern-day infrastructure tools, like river, sea, roads, ports, highways, airports and industry emerged in the previous centuries.

"Affordable and equitable access to the internet should be a fundamental right for the citizens," Bilawal said but in the same breath, he added that strict protocols for preventing misinformation, and the safety and mental health of the people were also essential.

Bilawal proposed a bill of digital rights of the people, saying that the rulers sitting in Islamabad were not affected by any disruption in the internet services because they rarely utilise them unlike the students and the common man.

"I think in our time we need for a bill of digital rights," he said, asking the academia and the youth to connect with him and send their proposals for the bill. He said that the academia was better suited to draft the law, compared with politicians or bureaucrats, who were less well versed in the internet use.

Once the bill was prepared and drafted, the PPP chairman promised that he would confront all voices of dissent in Islamabad, which he believed would certainly resist such a law, to table the legislation for digital rights in parliament.

Bilawal encouraged the youth to act as vanguards of the society for political change, attributing the political achievements of his grandfather, former prime minister and PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and his mother former prime minister Benazir Bhutto to the political activism during their youth.

Climate change

 

Bilawal believed that the young generation was qualified to make decisions for the country's long-term policies, because only the youth could think seriously about their future and "only they can break free" from the shackles of past.

Bilawal also listed the climate change as grave threat to the future generations and blasted the government for its lack of vision regarding this challenge. He said that the current Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) lacked the capacity to address the climate problem.

"I think keeping in view climate change, Pakistan should tear apart its entire PSDP and it should come up with a new PSDP, while keeping in view the environmental problems and the possible solutions," Bilawal told the convocation.

He believed that the root cause of a non-functional PSDP and the provincial Annual Development Plan (ADP) was those elderly persons of 60 or 70 years old, who called the shots. "The preparations they are making are just for the next five to 10 years," he said.

"And, honestly, they are not thinking about your [students'] future and that of your children," the PPP chairman added. "They just want to pass the upcoming budget and accordingly they make projects on the papers."

He said that a provision to make environment as a fundamental right had been inserted in the the 26th Amendment. He believed that with the help of the academia and the youth the government would have to build climate resilient infrastructure, green infrastructure, green and organic energy projects.

The PPP's unequivocal opposition to the construction of six canals from the Indus river also found a fleeting mention in Bilawal's speech as he said, reckoning that the prevailing water availability in the river and assessing the impending climate threats appeared to be missing in that project.

The PPP chairman blamed the PML-N government for continuing to utilise expensive imported fuel to generate electricity but at the same time denying Sindh of harnessing its wind, solar power and coal to produce clean and cheaper electricity.

"This is such a big joke ... that they claim they have excess electricity owing to which they won't allow us [Sindh] to produce solar, wind or coal based power," he said. He refuted that the power distribution companies had stopped load shedding, saying that they could prove this contention if any federal minister visited Sindh's cities.

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah also briefly addressed the convocation during which the students of the batches from 2019 to 2023 were awarded degrees.