LAHORE, Dec 8: Political parties seldom fulfill the promises they make through their election manifestoes and fail to achieve the targets of their programmes after coming into power.

Such a consensus emerged out of the discussion on “Importance of election manifestoes” held by the Pakistan Institute of National Affairs (PINA) here on Saturday.

Former foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmad Khan said manifestoes were an important part of political system of any country as they reflected the policies and programmes of parties which they intended to undertake after coming into power. But most of the parties, he said, failed to achieve the targets and the promises made to the people through their manifestoes proved hollow slogans.

Feudalism was the root-cause of all evils and political weakness in Pakistan, he said, as the feudal lords didn’t care to solve the problems of the people after they were elected. There was a need to change the political culture and efforts should be made to put an end to the feudalism to bring about a genuine democratic culture in the country, he demanded.

He said the feudal representatives in the assemblies always supported the military intervention in Pakistan. Without their support it was not possible for the military to intervene because both have common vested interests, Mr Khan said.

He said self-reliance on Pakistan’s own resources should be the next important feature of the manifesto of any political party. There was no dearth of natural resources and manpower here and what was required was the political will to make the best use of these resources and the potential of the people.

He said Japan and Korea, which had been badly damaged by the wars, had no natural resources but they had made tremendous progress by importing raw material from other countries and manufactured value-added goods and earned heavy foreign exchange by exporting them.

He said not only Pakistan, but most of the 57 Islamic countries of the world possessed rich natural resources. They had the world’s 70 per cent of energy resources and 45 per cent per cent of the natural resources, but their share in the world’s GDP was not more than five per cent.

He said the PPP had recently declared its manifesto which had made high promises of ending the poverty and solving the problems of the people, but it had not explained how it would achieve the targets fixed for various sectors.

Politician Qayyum Nizami, who presided over the meeting, said repeated military interventions had marred all the efforts of the political parties to establish democracy in the country. He said the manifestoes of political parties were important documents of their future programmes which provided guidelines to the people to decide which party they should vote for.

He said there should be pressure groups to implement the manifesto of the parties after they came into power.