Daily Times

Pakistan seems to be living the ancient Chinese curse, ‘may you live in interesting times’. It is a season of protests; on the one hand the deafening chants of thousands congregated to eulogise a murderer and on the other a few hundred conducting vigils to remember a martyred hero. Ignoring the huge discrepancies in size, the commonality in the two gatherings remains in the conviction for their respective cause. The strategy of the first group is unambiguous as always; they seek to muscle their way through the opposition, whilst the other group is slightly more ambivalent in the tactic that needs to be employed. The liberals, although united in their cause, are having an educated debate on the strategy that needs to be adopted. The more sane and mature voices are advocating the need for an evolutionary change, i.e. to do what is possible, and not what is desirable. The argument is perfectly justifiable since attempting to do the ostensibly impossible will not serve any useful purpose except maybe create more martyrs. Sun Tzu and Machiavelli are being cited to urge a tactical retreat since the battle is likely to continue for years, possibly decades and being outnumbered the liberals should slowly and surely make inroads into the system. The argument is pragmatic and realist, although it does manifest the low expectations and the limits of our liberalism. Nevertheless, the makers of the argument are in elite company.

Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mocking Bird is perhaps the most well known fictitious lawyer of the world. Finch defended Tom Robinson, the black man falsely accused of what in 1930s Alabama was the gravest of sins, the rape of a white woman. For decades now, he has become a role model for the legal profession all over the world. Atticus Finch prima facie was a liberal, taking on the most deep-seated and widely disseminated prejudices of society at that time. Malcolm Gladwell sometime back revisited Atticus Finch and his liberalism. Atticus Finch stood up to racism through the legal process and fought diligently, but lost. Finch at the end of the novel is dejected, not outraged at the verdict. He is content that he fought with his heart and legal ability and is dejected because he lost a legal battle. Throughout the book, Finch is not willing to look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of the courtroom and the particular case. He tells his children it is not desirable to hate Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan, or anyone for that matter. Being objective about Hitler has disturbing parallels in the debate regarding the current blasphemy laws in the country. The primary defence that Finch puts forth for his client is that he is the churchgoer, the “good Negro”; the victim by contrast comes from the town’s lowest breed of poor whites. According to Gladwell, Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another. Finch may have been a liberal in his particular spatial-temporal context, but the greatest fictitious lawyer of all times now comes across as fairly meek, if not a bigot by today’s standards of liberalism.

George Orwell, in an essay on Charles Dickens, argues that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth without any clear indication or suggestion that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much of a difference if it were overthrown. Dickens and Lee were tacitly arguing for accommodation and not change. The civil rights movement in the US would have not succeeded if it was lead by people like Finch, although they would have ensured that blacks were treated absolutely fairly under the discriminatory laws.

To argue merely for the correct implementation of the current blasphemy laws in Pakistan is similar to if Martin Luther King Jr had argued for better seating arrangement for blacks in public transport, albeit in a different compartment from the whites, or demanding better teachers for the all black schools, while not demanding that they be allowed to go to school with the white kids. The “I have a dream” speech punctuated with objective ifs and buts would have sounded like a briefing by Rana Sanaullah, and additionally be infinitely less memorable. Atticus Finch was pragmatic, a realist, whereas Dr King was being naively idealistic. Finch walks home after the case to fight another day, whereas Dr King, Malcolm X and Salmaan Taseer are all brutally assassinated. We are free to pick our winners from amongst them.

The reason given for treading carefully is that it is not a battle of a day, and in the long run the liberals will emerge victorious. There is some ambiguity surrounding really how long the long run is. The economist, John Maynard Keynes, once commenting on classical economics remarked: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

I am not arguing against cold strategy or planning for a long battle, however, incremental changes against systemic injustices rarely work since there is the real possibility of being overpowered by the very system which one seeks to change. There is this metaphor of the ‘boiling frog’, used notably by Daniel Quinn in The Story of B. The metaphor states that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will frantically try to clamber out. However, if it is placed in a pot of tepid water and heat turned on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death. To quote from Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, “It is better to burn out than to fade away.”

The writer is a Lahore-based lawyer and can be reached at saroop_ijaz@hotmail.com