Daily Times

We are the only nation on earth that is in love with both good and evil at the same time. The only nation to which the killer as well as the killed both are martyrs, and in Shah Abdul Lateef Bhitai’s words, “Tu’n hee ain azaab/tu’n hee raahata rooha jee” (You are my tormentor/You are the delight of my soul). Or, maybe, we are not able to judge the good from bad. And, the fact that our media, the biggest opinion-forming source, is heavily infested with hypocrites — the ones who start their articles and/or talk shows with Quranic verses and the sayings of Holy Prophet (PBUH)) against lie, prejudice and bias and then go on disgorging nothing but prejudice and bias and fallacies and lies — does not help either.

What can be said of a nation to which Malala Yousufzai is a patriot, an incredibly accomplished child for her age, who fought for girls’ right to education and is now trying to portray her country and people in a positive shade in good faith; and at the same time, she is a traitor, and a puppet whose strings are pulled by western intelligence agencies. Hakeemullah Mehsud, whose hands were tainted with blood of thousands of innocent civil and military Pakistanis, is a shaheed (martyr), and so are General Sanaullah Khan Niazi and thousands of others who were killed by Mehsood’s bandits. A nation, which is indecisive whether a MIT-trained, highly regarded, world renowned scientist, Pervez Hoodbhoy a jaahil (ignorant), or the ones who are known hate-mongering, semi-literates, whose sole claim to fame is half-baked provocative columns, inciting the nation against minorities and destabilising the governments by creating confusion and instability in the country, regardless of who is in power — in the time of Martial law singing virtues of democracy and in democracy dying for an autocracy. Being shaheed is the ultimate honour bestowed on the chosen ones, and at the same time, a dog can be a martyr, if killed by Americans!

Things become worse when government servants don a journalist’s cap, and all of a sudden, become the saviour of the ummah and the reformer of strayed Muslims. Which begs the question: does the law permit government bureaucrats to provoke openly and belligerently people against the constitution of the country and sing accolades for terrorists? Our selection process is seriously flawed if such people as the ones who cannot translate a paragraph from a book in English to Urdu correctly, slip through the CSS selection process, and subsequently, rise to high positions. If they deliberately misquote from a book on a TV show with an intention to malign the writer and invoke people’s religious sentiments against the ones who defend the truth, then that is a bigger crime. Arm them with the power of pen and they do what the proverbial monkey does when it finds a razor.

If the elimination of terrorism and lawlessness is the top priority of the government and highly watchful and overly active proactive judiciary, then why is such loathsome behaviour of some being condoned? No suo motu action for this? Maybe Ateeqa Odho’s ‘crime’ was more serious, to be promptly taken notice of by the most honourable supreme judiciary, than the incitation to terrorism.

One of Iftikhar Arif’s poem starts like this: “Haami bhi nahin, munkir-e-Ghalib bhi nahin thae/Hum ahl-i tazabzub kisi jaanib bhi nahin thae” (We were not Ghalib’s supporters, nor were we his detractors/We, the indecisive people, were on nobody’s side). Our case is quite the opposite. We are everybody’s supporters. Like the adage goes, “The one who pleases everyone pleases none”; in the process to appease everyone we are incensing everyone. Secretly supporting US drone strikes we try to please the American. And, in public we start cursing the US and mourning the dead terrorists. Trying to appease both, we get beaten from both for our duplicity.

When it comes to hypocrisy, a few nations can beat us at that art form. I was reading an urdu column the other day in which the writer, a known hypocrite, raising the question as to who deserves to be called a martyr, has posed a question whether Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto and Zulfiqar Mehsud (Hakeemullah Mehsud’s real name) are all martyrs. The columnist’s chronic bias against Bhutto has made him refer to Mehsud as Zulfiqar Mehsud, instead of using his known name), and called him a shaheed, lumping Bhutto and Benazir together with Mehsud! Maybe this is how he intends to justify his condemnation of Mehsud, a hater of Pakistanis, by condemning the heroes of millions of Pakistanis in the same breath. But comparing a killer of thousands of Pakistanis to those who did a lot, and to some, gave their lives, for the sake of the nation, only a person blinded by his bias can go that far.

And then you read the comments of social media warriors and you wonder who has poisoned their minds. Sometimes, I feel the Sindhi youth is lucky to have been spared of reading Naseem Hijazi’s distortion of history, which alone maybe the reason for non-existence of terrorism and fanaticism in Sindhi youth. Had they grown up reading him rather than Amar Jaleel and Naseem Kharal and Ali Baba, Sindh would have been destroyed a long time ago.

(Mea culpa: I read a couple of Hijazi’s novels in my youth days but got bored and quickly moved to Ibn-i Safi. Lucky for me!)

So what are we, an irresolute nation or a hypocritical people? Isn’t this the time for the nation to make up its mind whether we are with the terrorist or against them?

The writer is an independent commentator