Descent into madness, barbarism

The events of August 16, 2023 in Jaranwala have evoked an unusual chorus in harmony of condemnation. And so they should. But let us attempt a balance sheet of the good and the bad during and after the mayhem visited upon the Christian community on yet another dark day in our history.

First and foremost, it is well to remind ourselves that the horror of August 16 came just two days after we celebrated, with the usual pomp and show, the 76th independence anniversary of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan.

And what was this Jinnah’s Pakistan? If his August 11, 1947 speech to the Constituent Assembly is anything to go by, he argued Pakistan would be a religiously tolerant state in which all would be free to go their places of worship and practice their faith without any discrimination by the state.

However, with hindsight it can also be argued that the fate that met that speech (it was suppressed for years) and the events that transpired soon after the Quaid’s passing point to the different, if not opposite direction the state of Pakistan has traversed.

First, soon after the Quaid’s passing, came the Objectives Resolution, which, in placing religion at the heart of the state effectively negated Mr Jinnah’s stated objective of what the state of Pakistan would be like. That event opened the doors, incrementally, to steering the ship of state in the direction of a religious majoritarian polity, which effectively left the religious (and ethnic and other) minorities at its mercy.

Whatever space for their rights and protections survived this trend was effectively wiped out by General Ziaul Haq’s fanning the flames of religious dogmatism and extremism, whose perhaps unintended effect enveloped not just the religious minorities, but minority Muslim sects such as the Shias in its malign embrace.

That distorted Pakistan sculpted by General Ziaul Haq is what we have inherited today, and whose negative fallouts we cannot prevent nor change course in the direction of the religiously tolerant society Mr Jinnah envisaged.

Jaranwala is neither the first such atrocity against religious minorities, particularly Christians, nor, given the state of things, likely to be the last.

The evil forces of bigotry and other much more mundane worldly agendas such as revenge and seizing property illegally fan the flames of forces all too ready to take ‘advantage’ of our blasphemy laws. If the long Afghan wars fanned the flames of religious extremism inside Pakistan, they relied overwhelmingly on the Deobandi (minority Muslim) sect in Pakistan.

But towards the closing chapters of that monumental, long running war in our immediate neighbourhood, with its unintended radicalising fallouts in the shape of our own version of the Taliban (the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP), we experienced also the rise of the majority sect, the Barelvis, as a major player.

It is this sect, or rather its extremist manifestation the Tehreek Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) that was responsible for the assassination of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer in 2011 for defending a poor Christian woman entrapped in prison on a patently false blasphemy charge. It is also the organisation whose name more frequently than not pops up whenever an alleged blasphemy issue arises. If a report from Lahore of August 21, 2023 is to be believed, they have now expanded the circle of their unwanted attentions to members of an already beleaguered non-Muslim sect.

If all the above seems too negative, let us also look on the bright side. Following the Jaranwala outrage, there has been more than the usual ritual condemnation from the highest to the lowest in the land. Protests against the burning of churches and Christian homes in the immediate aftermath of announcements from mosques to ‘take the blasphemers and their community to task’ have taken place all over the country, but sadly exhibit the character of scattered protests, the unity on display between Muslims and Christians notwithstanding.

What, one wonders, is the attitude of the overwhelming majority of citizens who are silent? Do they feel the pain of the victims and the sensitive or are they beyond such empathy by now, having been subjected to the barbarism of extremist terrorist violence in its many forms for longer than one cares to remember? Have they resultantly suffered an exhaustion of sympathy, an emptying of spirit, or a self-preservatory retreat into confining oneself to things that affect one directly, not those that affect, even brutally, others?

There are no clear answers to these vexed questions about the state Pakistanis have been reduced to after all the traumas we have suffered for longer than one cares to recall. But wait, not all is black and worthy of mourning. Muslim neighbours of the Christian households under attack or fearing its impending arrival, sheltered their Christian friends and neighbours from the madness of the mob of fanatics that arrived to wreak vengeance for the alleged blasphemy, especially women and children.

This suggests all is not lost as far as humanity, rationality and good sense are concerned. Even during the madness and barbarism on display during the communal riots and massacres attending Partition, there were many such stories of friends and neighbours sheltering their threatened ‘other’, even at risk to themselves.

On this bleak juncture in our lives, can such examples lift our spirits enough to confirm our resolve to overcome the malign inheritance of General Ziaul Haq and ensure our society and state are cleansed of such manifestations of madness and mob vigilantism, an inherently irrational phenomenon? Because if we do not, even at this late hour, purge our state and society of religious extremism, terrorism and all its other effects such as intolerance, no one will be able to stop our seemingly inexorable and steep descent into barbarism.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023