Dilip Simeon's blog

Khaled Ahmad - The nation state’s fatal defect Nation states were sought to be superceded through the EU, ASEAN, EAC (Africa) and SAARC partly because they tended to designate external enemies and go to war with them in order to attain internal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...

Supreme Court has retreated from insistence on ‘due process’ in a state that is no longer sovereign. Terror has scuttled the institutions that normally maintain the state’s “monopoly on violence.” Lawyers in Pakistan may point to bad prosecution on the part of the state but the truth is that terrorists are not convicted and, if convicted, are not executed, because of intimidation. After killing Prime Ministers and governors, terrorists in Pakistan have killed another minister. Punjab Interior Minister Shuja Khanzada was killed in a suicide bombing in Attock after he claimed the entire command structure of an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist outfit had been killed in a “police encounter”. Can Pakistan have “normal” law and order? This month, Pakistan has gone through another crisis, once again involving parliament and the judiciary. A17-judge full bench of the Supreme Court ruled that parliament was right to establish military courts through the controve...

NB : These are two significant and complementary articles on the insurgent political ideologies that hide behind religion. Despite many differences between developments in India and Pakistan, what is similar is the political campaign to abolish the distinction between legal and illegal violence. Instead of enforcing the supremacy of the state, the political leadership is encouraging vigilante groups to engage in violence. In Pakistan the situation is complicated by the fact that the state was founded on the ideal of Islam as civic religion. This made it easy for Islamo-fascists to push a violent, theocratic agenda. This process is also underway in Bangladesh . In India the RSS worked for decades to enforce an ideological dictatorship in the name of a Hindu communal interest. (Read more about sabotage of the law in India). Here Hindutva functions as did State Shinto in Japan - a project to impose a state religion. Many imagine it to be 'Hinduism', but at this article argues, ...

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 ...

Is it true that 93 per cent of Malaysia’s women are “circumcised” and that Malaysia’s highest religious authority issued a fatwa in 2009 requiring the “cutting” of all Muslim women? This appeared in Pakistan’s The Express Tribune (February 20, 2015) and is difficult to digest. But a cousin of mine, who was once quite normal living here in Lahore but has gone nuts after becoming a British citizen in Liverpool, has written to tell me that Islam actually allows female genital mutilation. Years ago, Malaysia’s great leader Mahathir bin Mohamad told us in Lahore that his country couldn’t afford to follow Pakistan in imposing primitive hudood laws that reduced the testimony of non-Muslims and women to half. Today, Malaysian PM Najib Razak says his country is moderately Islamic. But others say he is letting the state go hard-shell Islamic because the Islamist elements in his party are too strong. And he has used the country’s notorious sedition act to jail his opponents because they reje...

NB - Indian citizens who feel somehow complacent because of the criminalisation of the Islamic Republic, should pay attention to the Indian politicians affiliated to the so-called 'parivar', who speak the language of exclusion on a daily basis. Their theory of Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of the 'Muslim Nation'. It is the doctrinal source of the same ghetto-fication and terrorisation of religious minorities that has taken place in Pakistan and Bangladesh. A state that allows religious dogma or religious definitions of nation-hood any space in its constitution is stepping out on a path that leads straight to hell. DS Julio Ribeiro - Why we must listen to Rohini Salian "The masterminds of the 26/11 attacks are treated like heroes in Pakistan. We are not there yet, but if hidden hands nudge the judicial system to free murderers of the saffron variety, we will be soon" Ipsita Chakravarty: The BJP is afraid of saffron terror probes because they point to...

We don’t know how the United Nations’ 6th World Happiness Report calculated that Pakistan is ahead of India, China, Iran, and Afghanistan on the ranking table of happiness. But ask anyone on the Pakistani street and you will be hit with more unhappiness than anywhere in South Asia. If you watch the TV channels in the region, the lack of joy in Pakistan will overwhelm you. And “unhappy India”, killing innocent Pakistanis across the LoC and harassing Pakistani diplomats in New Delhi through its secret agents, adds to this suffering. The world is actually enjoying all this secretly. After the recent Senate elections, Pakistani media succumbed to depravity as Pakistani politicians go for each other’s throat and the establishment herds them around at will as the “rejoicing third party”. This unnamed party is pulling the political rug from under the feet of the dysfunctional state and is set to booby-trap the June general election. India can get away with anything because it is not inte...

The case of leg-break bowler and test player S F Rehman is serious. He is now Maulana Sheikh Fazlur Rahman Al Azhari following the Wahhabi path of Islam - this after an MA degree and a PhD in Islamiat, and going to Cairo to embrace the “hard Islam” of Wahhabism, which rejects the 'imitative' jurisprudence of Pakistani Islam. He defended the killer of Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer, saying that the act represented a reaction against 'liberalism' that aims 'to destroy all faiths' Does cricket lead to religious piety? Or is religious piety so deeply ingrained in certain players that they go “pious”, which in Pakistan means growing a flowing beard, shaving off the moustache and putting a cap on? In Pakistan it is not a “phase” that you outgrow - it is a permanent transformation. And, it seems to pay off. In India, former cricketer Gautam Gambhir has embraced Hindutva but it is not the same thing. In Pakistan, you can even become the prime minister. In the...

Last month, the chief of the Pakistan Army Staff, General Raheel Sharif, spoke to the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute on “Security Outlook 2025: National Security and Defence Transformation”, and stated: “In contemporary geopolitics, the battles are no longer between state and non-state actors but with supra-individuals, those individuals who exploit both the national and international space for their desired objectives. These supra-individuals have the capacity to manipulate networks, organisations and state institutions to create waves of instability and create discord at the centre of the state institutions. Explosions are still a viable tool of war, but implosions are the new defeat mechanisms.” Who are these supra-individuals endangering the nation-state and the world? He didn’t use the word supermen, as it has been squeezed of meaning somewhat by cinema, where flying men come to the help of beleaguered humanity. He definitely meant leaders who arouse violence, the ...

In its savagery and brutality, the ISIS is acting strictly in accordance with the teachings and practice of al-Wahhab who enjoyed the active political support of the founder of the first Saudi state. In his Haj sermon on October 4 to the nearly two million Muslim pilgrims from across the globe assembled in Mecca, the Saudi Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, proclaimed that the killing of innocent human beings is the worst fitna (strife) and is strictly forbidden in Islam. Moving on from the general to the specific, he described the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the “enemy number one” of Islam and humanity. Sounds good, but it’s hardly good enough. Along with some other Sunni-majority Muslim countries in the region, Saudi Arabia is now part of the US-led coalition ostensibly committed to “degrading” and “destroying” the very monster they had until recently collectively nurtured in Syria and Iraq. Given the long-standing, mutually le...