Dilip Simeon's blog

Facebook is full of photographs where the Indian actor, Om Puri, is regaling drawing rooms in Pakistan with his thoughts on culture. He had the masterly knack of advocating his country in a milieu permeated with the venom of anti-India nationalism. He was familiar, not because he was photogenic like  Salman Khan  and  Aamir Khan , but because he was a natural actor who invited focus. There is genuine pain in the way Pakistanis talk about him now. They recount how he flew off the handle when India’s new street power forced a ban on Pakistani actors. He confronted India’s new nationalism on TV — and seemed taken aback by the assault from those who once loved him. Everyone else publicly ate the words they had spoken earlier against it. India suddenly seemed like Pakistan, accusing an admired public figure like  Imran Khan  of blaspheming against the Prophet (peace be upon him); there is nothing to do but apologise and save your life. Needless to say, ...

Khaled Ahmad - The nation state’s fatal defect Nation states were sought to be superceded through the EU, ASEAN, EAC (Africa) and SAARC partly because they tended to designate external enemies and go to war with them in order to attain internal cohesion. But there was another fatal defect equally in evidence: Once internally united, they embarked upon an even more lethal process, exclusion, that is, cleansing themselves of unwanted communities, to make themselves more “pure”. It so happened in Pakistan on June 15, 2016 that in a discussion called Ishq-e-Ramadan (Passion for Fasting), a well-known model, Hamza Ali Abbasi, acting as TV host on Aaj News, expressed sympathy for the constitutionally apostatised community of Pakistani Ahmadis. He was talking to a popular religious scholar, Maulana Kaukab Noorani Okarvi. Five million Ahmadis have been declared non-Muslim by the 1974 second amendment of the constitution, barring them from observing any Islamic ritual including fasting, w...

Shocking news from Belgium: Only eight of the 114 mosque imams in Brussels speak any of Belgium’s traditional languages. When Muslims betake themselves to the mosque to relieve their isolation in the host state, and listen to sermons advocating laws totally alien to modern life, they become more alienated than non-Muslim expats. The reason for this is the nature of the laws imposed on them as compulsory observance. The sharia was once disputed among Muslims; it is no longer. How should such old laws of behaviour be modified in our lives today? This modification is also required due to the tribal origin of sharia. Muslims are undecided about modifying the law of diyat (blood money), which anciently existed among tribes. Sadly, in the 21st century, they are moving towards a literalist interpretation of their law. In other words, the project of Islamisation is a kind of planned retribalisation of the state. The expat Muslim, therefore, is not only alienated/ dislocated by migration; ...

Pakistan’s death-wish hatred is the Ahmadi community. Nations trapped in the cycle of fate can’t resist a recurrent deathwish even when they know it is a death wish. Turks can’t live down their primal hatred of Armenians, and become Turks only when they collectively hate them. Iranians have the same kind of emotion about the Bahai. Once Germans hated Jews and killed a lot of them to post their “greatness” to the world. Pakistan’s deathwish hatred is against the Ahmadi community. It lives as a nation only if it kills Ahmadis and ceases to be a nation if it stops killing them...    In the fascist lexicon, a nation cannot become great unless it smears its face with blood On May 27, this appeared on the front page of the Pakistani daily, Dawn: “Gunmen shot dead a doctor from the minority Ahmadi community in Chenab Nagar town in Punjab. Mehdi Ali, a 50-year-old heart surgeon from the United States, was attacked as he visited a cemetery in the town of Chenab Nagar.” The name of ...

Pakistani judges don’t shy away from announcing personal piety in their judgments, and no one protests the injustice dished out to people who can’t be considered pious because they are non-Muslim. That’s what happens when you found a state on religion. On August 23, Dawn reported what Hindus of Karachi felt was happening to them. You have to harden your heart to read this. Those in India who feel bad about the Dadri lynching will empathise with this Karachi community. Are we separate without being different? In Karachi’s Jogi Morr in Qayyumabad there are slums where human beings live in excrement. The slum is worse than usual because the inhabitants are Hindus. It has been home to 4,000 Marwari-Gujaratis for the last 60 years. They must have moved to Karachi from the desert, their original home. Their leader, Krishan Bhandari, says the locality gets no water or electricity for days. “Our children left school because they don’t have identity cards as Hindus, and problems of liv...

No one knows more about Karachi than this extraordinary Frenchman named Laurent Gayer, with his undying French sensibility producing gems like “normalisation of the unofficial” to describe the death of a metropolis in his book Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (OUP 2014). He consoles us by saying Karachi is not as knocked-up as Caracas and Guatemala City in other parts of the world, where the state is in the same process of recession — silently predicting we may have to survive yet higher levels of violence in Karachi to match the thresholds achieved by them. Karachi was a halcyon city under the British Raj and under Pakistan, in the afterglow until the 1980s, when the country faced the Soviet invasion next door in Afghanistan, which stuffed the city with more alien populations than it could take without going bust. Gayer says Karachi was founded by Hindu “baniya” traders of upper Sindh, later supplemented by similarly occupied Hindus and Muslims from Gujar...

Moment of hope: February 29, Pakistan finally hanged the policeman Mumtaz Qadri who riddled Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer with bullets in 2011. Moment of despair: March 3, a mammoth gathering mourned Qadri and buried him as a “martyr”. The state cowered as the clergy, empowered to act like warriors over many years, condemned the supreme court for allowing the hanging, instead of beatifying Qadri as a blasphemer-killing saint. The court had observed that the governor had not blasphemed, and that, even if he had, Qadri criminally took the law into his own hands and must hang for it. Five years after the killing, the masses that gathered to mourn Qadri called him a “defender of Islam” and cursed the state. At Qadri’s funeral, the mourners were around 1,50,000, frighteningly disciplined, as directed by their religious leaders. The 39 Barelvi parties, blasphemy-obsessed, were there in strength; the Deobandi jihadi seminaries, empowered by training for assaults on India and Iran, bless...

Why has Pakistan vowed to end its “armed militias” in its National Action Plan (NAP)? In December last year, an exiled Pakistani warlord named Fazlullah killed 132 children in an army public school in Peshawar through his henchmen. The shock of what happened was so great that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called an all-party conference and got everyone to agree to a NAP against domestic terrorism. In the past eight months, Pakistan has pushed back the wave of terrorism thanks to the provision of the NAP that allowed the army to intervene. And NAP ordains getting rid of “armed militias”. But domestic terrorism has not died down. On August 9, a suicide-bomber killed over 70 in Quetta, many of them lawyers visiting the hospital where their leader had been brought earlier. Two terrorist organisations,  Islamic State  and Jamaatul Ahrar, announced they had carried out the massacre but Prime Minister Sharif thought it could be “states opposed to the Chinese Economic Corridor bein...

In the first week of 2017, Lahore was paralysed by roadblocks set up by the government to deny entry to mobs opposed to the  observance of the day Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was killed in 2011 by his police guard. Mumtaz Qadri, who shot him 27 times, was detailed to protect him against Islamist terrorists shadowing him for having opposed the blasphemy law. The name Qadri was a giveaway — carried by a sect that kills blasphemers — but Pakistan pretended not to know how murderous their schools of  religious thought had become. Taseer hadn’t insulted the Holy Prophet PBUH but had criticised the law for its flaws of excess, like death as minimum punishment without any room for mitigation. All religious parties backed by their seminaries are against amending the law to remove these flaws, but for the first time the country’s non-jihadist Barelvis had put on the warpaint and left the jihadists behind. The most extreme Barelvis — named after a city, Bareilly, in Indi...

The Sindh Assembly’s PPP majority is killing Karachi to avenge itself on the rival MQM that wins the urban vote in all elections. Its streets are full of rubbish, its roads broken, and its administration shot through with extractions in billions going to the feudal elite from rural Sindh that lives in Karachi, empowered by the city’s expanding underworld. The latest arrest, of a Karachi underworld don called Uzair Baloch, has opened a colossal can of worms of politics-mixed-with-crime, destroying Pakistan’s economic backbone. Two big political parties of the province — the rural Sindh-dominant PPP and the urban Sindh-dominant MQM — are dreading what Uzair may confess in the custody of the army’s border force, the Rangers. Karachi is the heart of Sindh, once populated by communities with a highly developed social consciousness from Gujarat. Like Mumbai, Karachi too was developed into a modern metropolis by Hindu, Parsi, Memon and Ismaili traders who lived in harmony. The Sindhi...

ISLAMABAD: A policeman shot two men in jail on Thursday, killing one accused of blasphemy and wounding another condemned to death on the same charge, lawyers and an activist said. Christian pastor Zafar Bhatti was killed and 70-year-old Briton Muhammad Asghar, who has a history of mental illness, was wounded in the attack in Rawalpindi.  Bhatti, who worked to protect the human rights of the country's beleaguered Christian minority, was on trial after he was accused in 2012 of sending blasphemous text messages. His family say police investigations show the phone was registered to someone else.  In recent weeks, Bhatti had received death threats in prison from both inmates and guards, his family told Pakistan-based human rights group Life for All. He was being held in the same cell as Asghar.  “This is a barbaric act. There had been threats. The court should have instructed police to ensure Bhatti's safety,” said Xavier Williams of Life for All. “Killing of a person ...