The chaos, disorder and mayhem the country finds itself in is mostly because many did not attend a formal classroom, and those few that did were coached on a curriculum that left the raison d’être of our country to be interpreted by bigots and war addicts. It is Pakistan Day; on this day 74 years ago we chose to give our independence a voice. Our determination to not be subjugated by the tyranny of the majority came to life and we asked “Can there be a separate state for Muslims?” However, this resolution included a specific section on the rights of the minorities in this construct of Pakistan. It called for their safeguarding and for the same rights being granted to them as would be to any Muslim.
This sinister inability of our people, years later, to be able to understand that these two components — demand for a country for a community and the protection of rights of other religions within that community — are not separate but intertwined and one is a logical extension of the other. To demand for one self what you cannot envision for the other is not just plain selfish, it violates the very principle of justice that requires objectivity and fairness. It is by following this thread of political objectivity that our founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah appointed Jogendra Nath Mandal to be Pakistan’s first Law Minister. The grand symbolism of that decision was lost with his death. The textbooks took over and our children read that there was a single enemy; it was vicious, violent, barbaric, oppressive and miserly. The enemy was the conniving Hindu that had butchered Muslims by the thousands during and before the partition of India and therefore we sought our independence in 1947. They stop there and do not provide the context of the violence that was everywhere on all sides.
If the first few decades after partition helped foster this hate, the rest of the decades led by the Afghan war and the rehashing of our curriculum, with help from friends in high places, now have a narrative of Pakistani Muslims living in a global minority with their way of life attacked by external forces. At the end this is a frothy concoction of anti-Hindu Talibanisation that creates more hate, fear and intense insecurity and results only in a violent blowback. Specifically, our literature, both in classrooms and that which is distributed at unregulated mosques and madrassahs, links Hinduism with paganism and pushes to have its existence appear as a threat to Islam. Thus, a dwindling seven million Hindus in a burgeoning country of about 180 million Muslims become a foreign body. No surprise then that a Hindu temple was burned down by a mob in Larkana, Sindh, on March 15, 2014. No surprise then that while the Hindu community celebrated the Holi festival while throwing powdered dyes on each other, an extremist mixed the dye with acid, causing three people to be rushed to burn units. No surprise that this community lives in a constant state of high alert and at the mercy of a trigger-happy majority. Any member of it can be framed under the pretext of having committed blasphemy, at any time. No surprise also, that Hindu women are forcibly converted to Islam. Often many of these cases of forced conversions go unreported. The real numbers are higher, the humiliation even more so. To survive, the message this peace-loving vibrant community is told to adopt is to become invisible. Is this why we made Pakistan, so we could wear the hat of the bully, the hegemon, the oppressor?
The only solace that can be offered to this community, concentrated mostly in Sindh, is that any right thinking person, any minority community, any woman, child and essentially anyone other than Wahabi sunni males are all in this fight with them. We are in it together. We will all either go down together, or fight this menace from the bottom up. There is another way to achieve this as well — top down. It is the government’s responsibility to protect its minorities, especially at times when they face the plague of religious extremism. Those who desecrate places of worship must be brought to justice, those who forcefully convert must be punished, and those who falsely accuse anyone of blasphemy must be made examples of. All religions are sacred under this flag. Only when the government declares a policy of zero tolerance for this systemic violence against minorities will we truly be able to claim a part of this day and its vision.
The writer blogs at http://pakteahouse.wordpress.com. She can be reached at [email protected]