[According to the Holy Qur’an, peace, amity and brotherhood among the
people are among the blessings of Allah, Correspondingly, the Divine wrath and
punishments take different forms, including civil strife and “violence of one another”. In the last
decade, Pakistan’s descent into chaos has been observed with deep anguish and profound
sadness by the Messenger of Allah of our times, Hadhrat Munir Ahmad Azim Sahib (atba) of Mauritius. Time and again, he has warned the Muslim country and its religious and
political leadership against the egregious violations of freedom of conscience,
of basic human rights and the norms of Islamic propriety and decency in the country. Recent
events from there confirm that country is in the grips of Divine wrath: the
deer prophecies and warnings made by the Divine Messenger have been proved to
be presciently true and correct.
For the benefit of our readers, we reproduce below an essay on the cult of militancy in Pakistan from
one of the leading writers from contemporary Pakistan, the Award-winning
novelist Mohsin Hamid who is the author of the novels 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' and the forthcoming 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia'.
The essay was originally written for, and published in, the New York Times.
India’s leading newspaper, The Hindu also carried it on February 24, 2013].
At the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration
of the militant
On Monday, my mother’s and
sister’s eye doctor was assassinated. He was a Shia. He was shot six times
while driving to drop his son off at school. His son, age 12, was executed with
a single shot to the head.
Tuesday, I attended a protest in
front of the Governor’s House in Lahore demanding that more be done to protect
Pakistan’s Shias from sectarian extremists. These extremists are responsible
for increasingly frequent attacks, including bombings this year that killed
more than 200 people, most of them Hazara Shias, in the city of Quetta.
As I stood in the anguished crowd
in Lahore, similar protests were being held throughout Pakistan. Roads were
shut. Demonstrators blocked access to airports. My father was trapped in one
for the evening, yet he said most of his fellow travellers bore the delay
without anger. They sympathised with the protesters’ objectives.
Minority persecution is a common
notion around the world, bringing to mind the treatment of African-Americans in
the United States, for example, or Arab immigrants in Europe. In Pakistan,
though, the situation is more unusual: those persecuted as minorities
collectively constitute a vast majority.
A filmmaker I know who has
relatives in the Ahmadi sect told me that her family’s graves in Lahore had
been defaced, because Ahmadis are regarded as apostates. A Baluch friend said
it was difficult to take Punjabi visitors with him to Baluchistan, because
there is so much local anger there at violence toward the Baluch. An
acquaintance of mine, a Pakistani Hindu, once got angry when I answered the
question “how are things?” with the word “fine” — because things so obviously
aren’t. And Pakistani Christians have borne the brunt of arrests under the
country’s blasphemy law; a governor of my province was assassinated for trying
to repeal it.
The
majority myth
What then is the status of the
country’s majority? In Pakistan, there is no such thing. Punjab is the most
populous province, but its roughly 100 million people are divided by language,
religious sect, outlook and gender. Sunni Muslims represent Pakistan’s most
populous faith, but it’s dangerous to be the wrong kind of Sunni. Sunnis are
regularly killed for being open to the new ways of the West; or for adhering to
the old traditions of the Indian subcontinent; for being liberal; for being
mystical; for being in politics, the army or the police; or for simply being in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
At the heart of Pakistan’s
troubles is the celebration of the militant. Whether fighting in Afghanistan,
or Kashmir, or at home, this deadly figure has been elevated to heroic status:
willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, able to win the ultimate victory,
selfless, noble. Yet as tens of thousands of Pakistanis die at the hands of
such heroes, as tens of millions of Pakistanis go about their lives in daily
fear of them, a recalibration is being demanded. The need of the hour, of the
year, of the generation, is peace.
Pakistan is in the grips of
militancy because of its fraught relationship with India, with which it has
fought three wars and innumerable skirmishes since the countries separated in
1947. Militants were cultivated as an equaliser, to make Pakistan safer against
a much larger foe. But they have done the opposite, killing Pakistanis at home
and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic conflicts abroad.
Normalising relations with India
could help starve Pakistani militancy of oxygen. So it is significant that the
prospects for peace between the two nuclear-armed countries look better than
they have in some time.
India and Pakistan share a
lengthy land border, but they might as well be on separate continents, so
limited is their trade with each other and the commingling of their people.
Visas, traditionally hard to get, restricted to specific cities and burdened
with onerous requirements to report to the local police, are becoming more
flexible for business travellers and older citizens. Trade is also picking up.
A pulp manufacturer in Pakistani Punjab, for example, told me he had identified
a paper mill in Indian Punjab that could purchase his factory’s entire output.
These openings could be the first
cracks in a dam that holds back a flood of interaction. Whenever I go to New
Delhi, many I meet are eager to visit Lahore. Home to roughly a combined 25
million people, the cities are not much more than half an hour apart by plane,
and yet they are linked by only two flights a week.
Cultural connections are
increasing, too. Indian films dominate at Pakistani cinemas, and Indian songs
play at Pakistani weddings. Now Pakistanis are making inroads in the opposite
direction. Pakistani actors have appeared as Bollywood leads and on Indian
reality TV. Pakistani contemporary art is being snapped up by Indian buyers.
And New Delhi is the publishing centre for the current crop of Pakistani
English-language fiction.
Security
hawks
A major constraint the two
countries have faced in normalising relations has been the power of security
hawks on both sides, and especially in Pakistan. But even in this domain we
might be seeing an improvement. The new official doctrine of the Pakistani Army
for the first time identifies internal militants, rather than India, as the
country’s No. 1 threat. And Pakistan has just completed an unprecedented five
years under a single elected government. This year, it will be holding
elections in which the largest parties all agree that peace with India is
essential.
Peace with India or, rather,
increasingly normal neighbourly relations, offers the best chance for Pakistan
to succeed in dismantling its cult of militancy. Pakistan’s extremists, of
course, understand this, and so we can expect to see, as we have in the past,
attempts to scupper progress through cross-border violence. They will try to
goad India into retaliating and thereby giving them what serves them best: a
state of frozen, impermeable hostility.
They may well succeed. For there
is a disturbing rise of hyperbolic nationalism among India’s prickly emerging
middle class, and the Indian media is quick to stoke the fires. The explosion
of popular rage in India after a recent military exchange, in which soldiers on
both sides of the border were killed, is an indicator of the danger.
So it is important now to prepare
the public in both countries for an extremist outrage, which may well originate
in Pakistan, and for the self-defeating calls for an extreme response, which
are likely to be heard in India. Such confrontations have always derailed peace
in the past. They must not be allowed to do so again.
In the tricky months ahead, as
India and Pakistan reconnect after decades of virtual embargo, those of us who
believe in peace should regard extremist provocations not as barriers to our
success but, perversely, as signs that we are succeeding. — New York Times News Service