Kapil Komireddi - For Over Six Decades Pakistan Has Been At War With Itself
Pakistan was created, in the words of its founder MA Jinnah,
to preserve “what is most precious in Islam.” But how do you determine what is
best in any faith? For more than six decades, Pakistan has been at war with
itself to answer this question. The principal casualties throughout this time
have been Pakistan’s intended beneficiaries: Muslims. It is to guard their
“purity” in a land inhabited by a predominantly non-Muslim population that
Pakistan was hacked apart from India.
Pakistan’s squalid condition today is a
cause for grief; but, as a direct consequence of the conscious choices made by
the people who still exude pride in calling themselves “Pakistani,” it is at
least understandable, in the pedestrian way that self-made tragedies often are.
But what of Pakistan’s other victims, particularly its
religious minorities, who have been made to endure the inexhaustible rage of
the country’s permanently self-pitying Sunni majority? More than 80 Christians
were slaughtered in a bomb attack just last week in Peshawar, a city that’s
only a two-hour drive from Pakistan’s capital. The news of this atrocity in one
part of the country was accompanied by a very Pakistani spectacle of
law-enforcement in another.
When Islamic clerics in Punjab murmured that a
handful of Ahmadi shrines had approximated the design of Muslim mosques –
minarets, verses from the Quran – high-ranking police officials rapidly
descended on the crime scenes and personally supervised the destruction of the
offending structures. Islam is an untiringly welcoming religion. But for some
in Pakistan, the self-appointed modern guardian of the faith, even to seek to
enter its fold is to invite the penal charge of heresy. In a way, the police
officers were doing the congregants a tremendous favour by demolishing their
mosques. Leaving them untouched would have brought in the mobs.
As a Pakistani newspaper
reported:
[A] rally led by former Azad Jammu and Kashmir minister of
religious affairs Sahibzada Hamid Raza stopped at Kabutranwali Ibadatgah and
demanded that the minarets, covered by cement, be razed. They warned that they
would do so themselves if they had to. The police complied.”
Bigotry against Ahmadis is enshrined in law: they are
legally barred from calling themselves Muslim. To obtain a Pakistani passport,
applicants must not only affirm their faith in Islam: they must denounce
Ahmadis as heretics from the faith. This is one of the ways in which Pakistan
has decided to protect “what is most precious in Islam”.
Another is to exclude
non-Muslims from full membership of the Pakistani state. On a visit to Pakistan
some years ago, I met a brilliant young Christian student. She had recently
returned from a debating trip where she’d performed exceedingly well. She had
big ideas. And yet, for all her talents, it was impossible to escape the
feeling that she had been crippled by her origins: as a non-Muslim, her
ambitions were limited by the law. People everywhere are defeated in the
pursuit of their dreams, but people like her in a place like Pakistan must
learn to dream small because they are, by virtue of their faith,
constitutionally prohibited from occupying the state’s high offices.
Such discrimination, codified in law and administered by the
state, makes it difficult to take much comfort in the posturing of Pakistan’s
liberals. They are performers who come out and do their act whenever minorities
are massacred. But they have nothing more to offer than shrill sentimentality,
a meaningless clamour to restore the “vision” of the founding father that’s
actually the cause of these carnages. They see no irony in denouncing the
murders of minorities while exalting a national idea that has little room for
minorities. Even Pakistan’s flag – the highest emblem of its nationalism –
confines religious minorities to tiny white strips: this is their place, on the
margins.
This explains why, since its creation in 1947, the numbers of
Pakistan’s religious minorities have declined. But to Pakistan’s patriotic
liberals, the oppression of religious minorities is always a deviation from the
founding ideal. They are like those mournful communists for whom, as Patrick
McGuinness puts it in The Last Hundred Days, “the failures of the
ideal were due to the misapplication of the ideal, all the barbarity of the
system was extraneous to the system and accidental to it.”
Perhaps it is possible that Pakistan may reform itself, that
it may unlearn its foundational myth as the defender of the Muslim destiny and
embrace pluralism. But that looks unlikely.
So it is that in today’s Pakistan men who have masterminded
the murder of countless Christians may never be caught, but a Christian woman
awaits execution for blasphemy against Prophet Mohammed even though no
compelling evidence of her offense exists.
Pakistan is now beyond moral rehabilitation. But India, if
it can find the will to be true to its founding ideals, could still save these
endangered minorities as Pakistani nationalism comes into full bloom.
When the subcontinent was amputated in 1947, Pakistan saw
itself as the authentic home of India’s Muslims. This vision, rejected by many
Indian Muslims, persists in Pakistan and is the basis of its savage claim on
Indian territory in Muslim-majority Kashmir. India, on the other hand, refused
to respond to the provocation of Pakistan by becoming a Hindu state. Istead, it
granted equal citizenship to all its inhabitants under a secular constitution.
The Indian project is today bruised by the rise of leaders who wish to
transform it into a “Hindu Pakistan”.
But one way to redeem it would be to
abandon the interminable sport of settling territorial “disputes” in favour of
population transfers. Pakistan was created for lovers of homogeneity and believers
in purity – for all those who feel they can flourish only in the midst of
Others Like Us. They have done well in Pakistan. Now India should open its
borders to Pakistan’s rejects – those millions of impure minorities and Muslim
secularists for whom another, final migration might be the only route to a
secure and confident future. Bleached of diversity, Pakistan will attain its
national goal: an exclusive homeland for intolerant Muslims. Bolstered by fresh
minorities, India will be saved from becoming its Hindu variant.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/09/29/for-over-six-decades-pakistan-has-been-at-war-with-itself/
The Broken
Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
