Daily Times

All writers receive
disapproving and hate mail and mostly avoid bringing it up, but sometimes critics come up with ideas that need to be refuted. Consequently, I share with readers the mail that reflected a mindset, which has resulted in the ascendancy of bigotry and suppression of national rights.

Moid Alam of Coalition For Restoration of Democracy (CRDP) criticised my piece, ‘Why don’t black Americans swim?’ (Daily Times, January 2, 2011). I replied explaining my viewpoint. His reply impelled me to write this column.

He wrote, “I again say, the author picked ethnic ratio in SC and blacks absence in swimming as the two major manifestations of discrimination. There are two things wrong with this:

1. It does not necessarily reflect discrimination.

2. Nowhere do we see qualification of these SC judges being questioned, and asking can we do better than these jokers?

I say, nationalists should demand only one thing (and I do): Empowering regional governments, so that they take care of their affairs. If it results in no school and no teacher for any locality in Balochistan or Sindh (and hence no doctor, judge, engineer from these areas), so be it. This tendency to blame federal government for all kind of [wrongs] can be stopped this way.”

My reply was, “You have said, ‘I say…Empowering regional governments…can be stopped this way.’

“I suppose the leaders of colonial powers like Britain, France, Belgium, Spain etc, when forced to relinquish their colonial possessions, must have said exactly the same thing. I really wonder why do you arrogantly think that it is only you who can put things right for the Baloch and Sindhis. I wonder what sort of coalition of democracy is envisaged by you.

“Why do you suppose the Baloch or Sindhi would end up with no schools and consequently doctors if they manage their own affairs? This is reflective of a colonial mindset, which has brought things to this pass. I suppose the British too must have thought similarly when they relinquished the Trucial states.”

Replying to this, he first said that I had misunderstood him and then said there was nothing wrong with his position. There is a lot that is wrong with this position because it smacks of colonial prejudices against the Baloch and Sindhis who are considered incompetent and unqualified to manage their own affairs.

Here I give the attitudes and strategy employed by France and Britain in their colonies as an example. An author at a reliable and reputed online encyclopaedia (encyclopedia.jrank.org) says, “Colonialism by its very nature has racist connotations. British colonialism in particular was structured as a dictatorship, using violence to pacify the colonial subjects and to maintain order. There was no input from the colonised in the way that they were governed: The British Colonial Office in London made all the decisions concerning the colonies. The British also tended to choose a preferred ethnic group over all the others in the countries that they colonised. These preferred groups, usually a conservative minority within the country, were supported to the extent that they worked against the interests of their fellow Africans. For example, the British chose the Arab minority to lord it over the majority Africans in the Sudan and favoured the Fulani in Nigeria. The British preferred ethnic societies with dictatorial and hierarchical systems like their own, and they recruited members of these ethnicities in disproportionate numbers into the colonial military. At independence, these soldiers often staged coups and removed the democratically elected civilian governments of their countries.”

For France it says, “Associationist policies imagined a colonial governance in which older elites joined with new African leaders in reinforcing the colonial order through nominally consultative assemblies and other such superficially participatory institutions. Association rested on a profoundly racist conception of cultural identity. The doctrine of association held that the differences between coloniser and colonised prevented the establishment of political systems in Africa divorced from pre-existing institutions. In other words, association, as an intellectual concept, viewed Africans as inextricably wedded to the past and incapable of attaining the level of French political and social forms. Association took root in twin assumptions: (1) that French social and political organisation represented the pinnacle of cultural achievement, and (2) that Africans could never quite achieve that pinnacle.

“As a political programme, assimilation required the eventual adoption of French culture, politics, social mores, and beliefs by Africans. Assimilation followed directly upon the conception, incorrect though it was, of empire as a project of tutelage. As the civilising mission maintained that colonialism aimed at raising Africans to the level of European colonisers, at its core it implied the ultimate abandonment of colonial cultures in favour of assimilation to the French model. Assimilation was, in its essence, an ideology of cultural annihilation. Assimilationists held that colonial cultures, whether in Madagascar or Africa or Djibouti, would inevitably die out as people abandoned their previous, backward practices in favour of the civilised, French model. Assimilation was, of course, in no way less racist than associationist thought — the first implied a teleology that valorised French norms and denigrated any non-European ways of life, while the latter reinforced a belief in the definitive inability of non-Europeans to accommodate change. Assimilation, with its implied cultural annihilation, and association, with its ideology of irreducible difference and inferiority, articulated diametrically opposed political programmes for the colonies, yet both refused to grant Africans the ability to participate, as equals, in political and intellectual life in the French colonies.”

Britain and France were conscientiously emulated; the only difference was that being co-religionists, the rulers here used religion in combination with brute force as the ‘battering ram’ to demolish the old existing identities and as their weapon of choice to achieve ‘strategic depth’, but this policy is now undoing the structures it was supposed to strengthen. This use of this ‘battering ram’ has resulted in rank intolerance and sordid fundamentalism taking over as the prevalent ideology and discontent among the nationalities.

All the wounds are literally self-inflicted and such wounds do not heal easily. The sad and tragic assassination of Salmaan Taseer is a direct consequence of that policy and ominous signs portend that this senseless violence will intensify in future. The cancer of bigotry that is eating away the innards of the state will not be stemmed because the ‘establishment’ does not even have half a will or wit to check it.

Unfortunately, the ‘establishment’ and its supporters with their colonial mindset and prejudices consider ruling the Baloch, Bengalis, Sindhis and Pashtuns their birthright and find it extremely unpalatable to even think that they are capable of managing their own affairs. Moreover they believe that they are doing a great favour by ruling them. They do not realise that they squandered the initial goodwill of all with their arrogance and follies and though most learn from their mistakes, here they keep digging the hole deeper and deeper, steadily eliminating any hope of redemption.

The writer has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com