ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Information & Broadcasting Qamar Zaman Kaira on Monday said that joint efforts were needed for the promotion of tolerant values in the society and for defeating extremism and terrorism.

He was addressing a one-day seminar on the role of educational broadcasters in eradication of growing tendencies of intolerance and violence in society organised at the Allama Iqbal Open University here.

Kaira said our society was becoming stagnant and intellectuals and academia should play a constructive role by initiating a dialogue on the issue of extremism. He said politicians, armed forces and the media can become a tool in the dialogue to be launched by the intellectuals, but it is basically the domain of the academia to launch the dialogue.

He said intellectual movements all over the world were launched from academic institutions and it was high time that our writers and intellectuals started a new thought process to cleanse the society from the menace of terrorism and extremism.

Kaira said even today, when life of each and every Pakistani was affected by the war on terror and extremism in society, some people still believed and said that it was not our war.

He said Pakistan had traditionally been a very tolerant society till the 1970s but it was intentionally transformed into an extremist one by the international powers, with the connivance of the then rulers to achieve their own agenda.

Today, when the world wants us to act for the eradication of extremism, we tell them that it was the western powers that used the same extremist elements for their own designs, Kaira said.

Even today, when we are fighting terrorism, the west has only come to our help when this menace has affected them, he added.

He said the extremist mindset was present in every corner of the country and we have to defeat it by using our words as weapons to positively transform the minds.

Kaira said Pakistan was facing many challenges today but the biggest of them was the menace of terrorism and extremism.

He said since the day the present government came to power, it took several steps to overcome the multiple crises.

We introduced constitutional, political and administrative reforms but there are many issues that still need to be addressed, he said.

He said historically this part of the world has been ruled for centuries by foreign powers most of whom were despotic rulers. He said although Pakistan was created in the name of Islam and through democratic means, later on unfortunately we failed to promote a democratic culture as envisaged by our forefathers.