The plight of the minorities

August 11, 2024 was ‘celebrated’ as Minorities Day, as has been the custom now since 2009. The date, August 11, was chosen to mark Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, just three days before Pakistan came into being.

The Founder’s speech has had a troubled existence in the state he virtually single-handedly brought into existence against heavy odds.

After his untimely passing in September 1948, the speech was suppressed for many years by those who deviated from the letter and spirit of the Quaid’s farsighted and liberal vision in favour of a narrow, bigoted, exclusivist emphasis on majoritarian Muslim rule, at the expense of our religious minorities.

Since the late 1970s and 1980s, when military dictator General Ziaul Haq weaponised majoritarian religion, even our Shia minority has suffered the travails of sectarian conflict.

The thrust and essence of the Quaid’s vision is summed up by the most famous extract from his historic speech:

“The first duty of a government is to maintain law and order…So that the life, property and religious beliefs of its (citizens) are fully protected by the state…We should begin to work in (this) spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities – the Hindu community and the Muslim community – because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on – will vanish…You are free; you are free to go to your temples; you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan.

You may belong to any religion, caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state…You will find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

Could there be a more enlightened delineation of the contours of the new state, especially in the context of the communal bloodletting between Muslims on the one hand, and Hindus and Sikhs on the other that accompanied Partition and smeared our historical memories blood red for the foreseeable future, engendering visceral hatreds and enmity between peoples who shared a historic legacy of the tolerant, syncretic, peaceful co-existence that defined the Subcontinent before the ravages and malign ‘Divide and Rule’ of British colonialism?

The Quaid wanted us, despite this painful beginning, or even because of it, to transcend the pain and tragedy to forge a state and society that could hold its head up high as the newest entrant in the comity of nations as a role model of mutual tolerance, respect and peaceful co-existence.

Unfortunately, the Founder, exhausted because of the strains of the titanic struggle he had led, and ill with a terminal disease, could not have foreseen the malign forces waiting in the wings to pounce soon after his exit from this mortal coil. Within a year of his demise, the Quaid’s vision of a liberal, tolerant, and yes, secular state, was washed away by the tide unleashed by the Objectives Resolution, which converted his enlightened, modern, forward looking vision into a majoritarian religious entity that implicitly threatened the rights and even lives, properties and existence of the religious minorities in whose interest and defence the Quaid had unfurled his banner.

Within another four years, in 1953, while the dominant West Pakistani political class, bureaucracy and military played out their mutual tussle over the country’s Constitution, the anti-Ahmedi riots in Punjab elicited the first (partial) Martial Law in our independent history, a foreboding opening act of what was to come.

Of course by 1974 the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government succumbed to the pressure of the religious lobby by declaring the Ahmedis a non-Muslim religious minority, thereby pre-empting (but only postponing, as later events proved) this lobby from destabilising his hold on power.

While the Second Amendment that brought about the declaration of Ahmedis as non-Muslims because of their non-adherence to the belief of the finality of the Prophethood of Hazrat Mohammad (PBUH), it inadvertently opened the door to the wiping out of the memory of leading Ahmedis’ contributions to Pakistan (e.g. Sir Zafarullah Khan and Dr Abdus Salam), threats to, and the killings of Ahmedis (which mercifully have declined in later years), and currently, the vandalisation of their places of worship and even forbidding religious rituals inside their homes.

The point is that even a religious minority, albeit one that arouses the blind ire of our mullahs, still has some rights as citizens. What would the Quaid have made of our treatment of this community in the light of the quote from his speech above?

Hindu girls, particularly in their area of concentration, Thar, Sindh, have been subjected over the years to forced conversion and marriage, usually at the hands of, and in fact to, self-appointed purveyors of this practice that Islam and the Prophet (PBUH) forbid. Christians live in constant fear of motivated blasphemy allegations, in whose wake, more often than not, mass attacks on the community, their homes, churches, lives have by now become the established features of our urban legends.

Motivated blasphemy allegations have not spared Muslims either, such are the passions unleashed amongst vigilante mobs at the mere suggestion of any such circumstance.

Our considerable Shia minority has not been spared the gift of sectarian violence (Parachinar seethes with this even today), and the hardworking and peaceful Hazaras of Balochistan have suffered killings most of all for no fault of theirs except received faith and ethnicity.

The ‘sin’ of historically received ethnicity and minority nationality status has not spared the Baloch, Pashtuns or Sindhis (there are others of course). Even the majority ethnicity in united Pakistan, the Bengalis of East Pakistan, were not spared (those who have harboured ill will against Bangladesh because of 1971 are crowing with delight at recent events in that country).

This necessarily brief and admittedly inadequate discussion of what we have wrought against our religious and ethnic minorities (and even our once ethnic majority) runs contrary to the grain of the Quaid’s ideas. We should all therefore respectfully bow our heads and ask for his forgiveness for our sins in this regard.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024