This Independence Day our heads hang in shame once again. The ideologues who later sat down to chronicle the birth pangs of Pakistan mixed a good measure of indoctrination and self-righteousness as they retrospectively defined the rationale for the creation of this country.

Eliminating communal violence, for one, became the rallying cry of the Pakistan Movement in its final months, which sought to safeguard India’s minority Muslims’ rights against the majority community. Had Pakistan treated its minorities with dignity, we wouldn’t be ashamed today.

Though violence targeting minorities is not the norm here, the survivors of such violence will tell you it marks the end of their lives as bona fide, full citizens of the state. This is because, besides widespread social discrimination, the state by enacting laws that readily work as tools of oppression against minorities has been a partner in crime.

What happened earlier this month to the Christian Almas Hameed’s family in a Punjab town, Gojra, mirrored the brutal burning alive of a Muslim baker’s family in India’s Gujarat state in 2002 at the hands of a charged-up anti-Muslim mob. Six of Hameed’s family members, mostly women and children, were burnt alive by enraged fanatics who were allegedly egged on to punish Christians for desecrating the Quran by a PML-N leader.

The Indian Gujarat baker had to suffer death and destruction for the alleged burning by Muslims of a train packed with Hindu pilgrims at the Godhra station, miles away. Likewise, Hameed’s family bore the wrath of a Muslim mob for the alleged desecration of the Quran by some Christians in a nearby village. Punjab’s ruling party has responded by just suspending the membership of Qadeer Awan, a local president of the PML-N, who the party admitted was behind the anti-Christian violence. The spokesman said the PML-N was ‘embarrassed’ at his conduct. And only that.

Will the brave, new, independent judiciary take note of and express its displeasure with the Hudood Ordinances, the Law of Evidence and the blasphemy laws that incriminate innocent minority members before any verdict is pronounced? Will the killers of Gojra ever be brought to justice? Will the PML-N lead a long march on Islamabad of the wronged minorities as victims of systematic brutality against them? Not a chance.

It’s not just the Taliban who have their sympathies elsewhere; the so-called and perceived enlightened, educated and clean-shaven politicians who keep mum on issues of discrimination against a sizable section of society do the country no service either. But as the rights activist Asma Jahangir aptly pointed out in an interview with the BBC, 'It is not just political parties. There are radicalised individuals and supporters of militant groups within the judiciary, the education system, the bureaucracy and the police....'

At 62, Pakistan is a study of what has gone wrong with a state that started out as a dream for a large section of pre-independence India’s minorities. It can be argued today that the Muslim minority that started the new country proved itself inept at handling its own affairs — as even the initial years showed. In the new Muslim-majority country, we created political and ethnic minorities as the new bêtes-noire where none had existed before.

The Bengali majority was politically treated as a minority by denying it due representation in state institutions. Even as that long, sordid chapter came to an end with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, the travails of Sindhis, Pakhtuns and Baloch nationalists have continued. So who today is a Pakistani first and a Sindhi, Baloch, Pakhtun or a Punjabi next? The answer is scathing, and we all know it.

A lot of what is wrong today stems from the rhetoric of our rulers — make no distinction between the elected and the dictatorial — their lack of action when it is needed and the textbooks we teach our children from.

Madressah educationaside, a pumped-up majoritarian religiosity seeps through the textbooks in subjects like social studies, language teaching and even handwriting exercises, linking Pakistani identity with a religious one. Pakistan Studies books take the cake with their anti non-Muslim sentiment. There is little at variance in the content and the narrow-minded thrust of textbooks taught in the public and the so-called elite English-medium schools today.

This systematic social engineering is based on a post-Jinnah, trumped-up ideology, which in the words of the Quaid-i-Azam himself would have served its purpose as soon as Pakistan was achieved when he declared before the first Constituent Assembly that every Pakistani thenceforth was an equal citizen of the state.

The historic speech, which defined the contours of the state that should have emerged from the 1940s’ struggle by Indian Muslims for political equality, used to be part of the university syllabus. Not anymore; because the state subsequently did the exact opposite by enacting laws that discriminate against minorities.

More Gojras, and the like, cannot be prevented unless they are actively taken up for prevention. Pakistan’s minorities will remain on the wrong side of the state, and a people fed on a dangerously communal rhetoric that has been reshaping the soul of the state as it were. A nation’s need for repeated reassurance is a malady. It cannot be treated by putting down all that it perceives as being alien. Exclusion of any one group, or sets of religious and ethnic minorities, only breeds contempt, at best a forced conformity.

Only inclusive societies can realise the promise of achieving their collective aspirations. This, in our case, was equal opportunity for all citizens regardless of their caste, creed, gender or faith — the very fault-lines we have religiously drawn and maintained to divide ourselves along. A fragmented, motley crowd hardly makes a nation.

(Courtesy Dawn Media Group)

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/16-is-gojra-our-godhra-hs-04

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Best Regards

Mubasshar
Long Live Pakistan