Mohammed Hanif - The Disappeared, Pakistan
KARACHI, Pakistan —
Every few weeks I get a phone call or text message informing me that yet
another journalist, political activist or someone hyperactive on social media
has gone missing. From past experience I know that they have most likely been
picked up by one of the secret agencies. I also know that when they return
they’ll be changed people.
When they disappear,
they are opinionated and noisy; they believe their 800-word op-ed or their
Facebook post or the poem that went viral will change the world. When they
return, they have become the sort of people who will say, it was nice knowing
you, why don’t you shut up and go away? It’s as if they
weren’t abducted by the state and kept in a dungeon or a safe house, probably
interrogated, in some cases tortured, and always threatened. It’s like they
went to some rehab program from which they have come back fully reformed and
compliant.
In the past year, hundreds
of political activists in Karachi have been picked up, and some renounced
their loyalties upon their return. They leave the country if they can;
otherwise, they try to become unquestioning citizens. Maybe they are right.
What good has ever come of talking about state abduction and torture and
solitary confinement?
A number of character
flaws can make you a missing person. Maybe you have not cursed
India enough for its atrocities in Kashmir. Maybe you belong to a
religious militant group. Maybe you are too fond of questioning the army’s role
in the country’s affairs. Maybe you criticize
the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a grand network of roads and bridges
that is supposed to transform our fortunes. Or maybe you just protest too much
about other missing
persons.
Five
social-media activists disappeared recently. They were little known
outside their own social-media bubbles. They were gone for almost three weeks,
and during their absence, a slew of tweets
and pro-army Facebook pages claimed that some of them had been posting
material that insulted our religion. Blasphemy is
a killer charge. Any word or action that is seen to cause offense to any
religious group - in fact, anything construed as insulting a religious figure - can make you an open target for religious zealots. Calling
someone a blasphemer is a blood sport. Pakistan’s interior
minister went on record to discourage such accusations against the five missing
activists. But these charges have built-in momentum. Once accused of blasphemy
you can’t really ward that off: How do you defend yourself against a charge
that can’t be repeated in public? What exactly is it that you didn’t do?
Imagine getting
released after a few weeks in a dungeon and re-entering the world only to see
people on national television demanding your head and religious parties on
street corners waiting to lynch you. First, you were disappeared by the state;
then when you are released, you feel forced to disappear from public life. It’s not just that the
state is stifling dissent; it’s also making everyone wonder: Have I crossed the
line? Where was that line? How come that other person crossed every line of
decency and still has a TV show?
And it’s not only the
state and its intelligence agencies waging war on common sense; the media and
other civil institutions are as well. Aamir Liaquat Hussain,
one of Pakistan’s leading television preachers, has turned into a political
analyst and in a series of nightly programs, accused
the missing activists of having committed blasphemy. Then he said they
had defected to
India. Then he singled out a
number of Pakistani journalists who had spoken out for the missing,
and accused them, too, of blasphemy. Mr. Hussain has worked for almost all the
major channels, usually as one of their top earners. He puts lives in danger,
and media owners bid for him.
ARY Network, a
Pakistani TV station, recently lost a
libel suit in London brought by a rival it had accused of committing
blasphemy and being an Indian agent. Its defense in court: Nobody
really takes our TV anchor seriously. Never mind that when
one journalist accuses another of blasphemy, he only exposes himself more to
being targeted for the same thing.
A journalist friend
recently told me about being picked up and taken to a safe house for a
so-called debrief about his work. Three good, patriotic men from an
intelligence agency told him they knew everything about his children’s school,
his wife’s job, his father’s career. He was told that there were two kinds of
troublemakers in this country: foreign agents and fools.
“We have seen your
bank accounts and you are nobody’s agent. You appear to be a mere fool,” they
told him. The message was clear: Stop being a fool. We know which school your
kids go to. I submitted an Urdu
translation of one of my novels to a leading publisher a while ago. Through a
mutual friend I was asked to change a few things, just to be on the safe side.
Nothing was specified. I respectfully inquired what bits I should change. You
are intelligent enough, I was told; you live here, you should know. That’s the scary part,
I don’t really know if I am intelligent or a fool.
Mohammed Hanif is the
author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice
Bhatti,” and the librettist for the opera “Bhutto.”
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