Daily Times

One should not be surprised that we have a culturally sensitive Frenchman trying to respect our local customs in the heart of the capital city. As I read his words and offer some circumspect belief, I admire him all the more. Let the following not question the love I harbour for my citizens or for this land, which is soaked in the blood of martyrs, as the late Mehdi Hasan put it.

Meet France, a nation that loves the word freedom, one word that it has too often used to encroach upon Muslim lands in the Middle East and ban the burqa at home. Yes, what started as a parliament bill (2003) to limit the use of conspicuous religious symbols in French primary schools (like headscarves) evolved into a 2010 law to prohibit the use of full face covering headscarves. The law met strong public support as the full body veil was taken as a tool of suppression; the 5.5 million Muslims in France could not do much about it. Was Mr Lafforgue there when the sentiments of the French Muslim populace were sidelined in the name of human rights and freedom? It is possible, for he really seems to care about our religious customs, so much so that he would keep us away from the path of religious hypocrisy.

Also, meet the lordly British who came to the Indian subcontinent and ensured that the sun never set on their empire or, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, the “white man’s burden” was adequately dispensed as the British polished the indigenous with their sublime culture. Perhaps this whole repertoire became so tiresome at times that they took a break, the means of which was selective apartheid: clubs and restaurants would carry notices that said, ‘Dogs and Indians not allowed’. Some time passed and India saw two great men, a Jinnah and a Gandhi who fought tooth and nail for and against partition, amidst which the question of keeping the British as masters was not even a consideration.

Then the British were gone, Pakistan was born and what a proud nation it became over time. It was not just independence from the tyrannical Hindu majority or the contemptuously burdened British masters — it was a ticket above the law. It was independence from everything and anything that could bind a man. If laws stood in the way of the poor man, he would break them. If laws stood in the way of the rich man, he would change them. Like the jungle, the law never mattered and perhaps Rudyard saw it all along when he wrote The Jungle Book in the halls of the National College of Arts where his father was principal.

Back to our Frenchman: please meet Mr Lafforgue who dared to open a fine dining French cuisine restaurant in the heart of Islamabad and banned the indigenous populace, quite forgetting that they had already rubbed shoulders with the English culture. However, is this really about contempt and culture? Here is a man who cooks his fine food in alcohol and serves his distilled wine, one such cuisine which the Prohibition Ordinance 1979 precludes more than 98 percent of Pakistanis from consuming. Here is a man who is so willing to obey your law that he precludes you from breaking it, one such law that many would love to break.

If the laws of the General Zia era are too fatherly, then we should stand together and bring them down but no one will because the late General played a master stroke: standing against those laws would be standing against your own religion and religious we all are at the end of the day, believe it or not. As the laws would have it, a Muslim journalist could not have started a Twitter war against our Frenchman because he would be asked what he was doing there in the first place.

The story was a bit more picture perfect and, as chance would have it, a much directed chance by the way, a minority journalist raised this issue on Twitter, which culminated in a police clampdown on his restaurant, and equated it with the contemptuous way of the British masters who would not consort with dogs and Indians in their restaurants. Everyone joined this myopic bandwagon of pseudo-nationalism and quite ignored the other side of the coin, which I shall now flip.

Let alone a derogatory signboard for dogs and Pakistanis, the Frenchman did not even have a signboard to indicate that this was a restaurant. The prerequisite for entry was a passport that was not green in colour and our local public would not have it. What no one noticed was what the Frenchman sought to achieve but only cared how he did it. What has hurt us the most today? The fact that we cannot drink according to our own laws or that this Frenchman made it a point to ensure we could not?

If the Frenchman is to be believed and his words are examined, this has nothing to do with contempt or labelling us an inferior race. He played to the rule book but executed it in a devious fashion. Only two percent of Pakistan suffered — those who were not Muslims to begin with and the only thing they were denied was French food, which does not amount to life-changing denial in the first place.

What Mr Lafforgue failed to understand, however, was that this country is The Jungle Book and he would have been in business for decades to come had he allowed people to dine in and wine up in defiance of their own legislation. This is how it works here, in Pakistan.

The writer is a freelance columnist