Principally, the only point of a constitution is its ability to protect the life, property and fundamental rights of individual citizens. Also, the State's control of its citizens is a relic of the monarchical past, where instead of law, the ruler was the law, and he acted like a father or mother taking care of his subjects.
When law rules supreme, however, it means that the laws and the State give equal protection to every citizen's life, property and fundamental rights. That is why all the attacks on the constitution first require the suspension of these fundamental rights.
That brings us to two beliefs: that it is right to deprive others of their natural freedom, and that it is not. Whether those who deprive others of their freedom also try to control their lives or not is beside the point: what is important is whether this deprivation is achieved by force or by (false) law.
Such rule of law, ensuring the fundamental rights of each citizen to live his life as he wished, was missing in Pakistan, and created a vacuum, which many groups and parties, religious, sectarian, ethnic and otherwise, and a conglomerations of intellectual, political, business and military elites rushed to fill. This vacuum was deliberately kept intact and prolonged is obvious.
What is happening around us in Pakistan today again proves that the nature of the crises is constitutional. It explains the onslaught of the Taliban as a violent resurrection of that mindset, which was never brought under the constitution nor dealt with constitutionally. The absence of a constitution, and when we had one, its sheer violation by all elites, intellectual, religious, political, business, and military, strengthened that mindset.
Additionally, this mindset was deliberately strengthened by all the elites to perpetuate their rule and hegemony, and to protect their parasitism. It was nourished and nurtured and trained at the cost of constitutional provisions, relating especially to fundamental rights and especially religious freedom.
So, what was sowed by the intellectual, political, religious, business, and military elites is being reaped mostly by ordinary citizens in the form of absolute insecurity that threatens their very existence without any reprieve in sight. This tragedy is deeper than our imagination can fathom: the number of Hardcore Taliban in Pakistan may well be smaller, as is repeatedly claimed these days by the political and military elites, as hundreds or thousands, who will be wiped out in months, but who can enumerate the number of Softcore Taliban living amongst us! The Softcore category can be divided into active and passive.
Religious groups and parties fall into the active, while the passive are those ordinary citizens who are unaware of their own Taliban mindset. This passive category openly believes in depriving others of their freedom and controlling their lives according to its own scheme of thought. That may be why we see no mass agitation against the Taliban in spite of their killing us indiscriminately.
To fight this war we first have to admit that we are in the midst of an intellectual as well as a real war. The constitution of 1973 should be the rallying point for all who do not believe in depriving others of their freedom and who believe in the fundamental rights ensured in that constitution. Not only will that help us fight both the Hardcore and Softcore Taliban but it will help bring harmony, peace, stability and happiness to Pakistanis!
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