Daily Times

Remembering Prof. Waris Mir on his death anniversary brings to mind his prolific scholarly writings that used to advocate democracy and liberal and progressive thoughts during General Zia ul Haq’s conservative and repressive rule. A professor at the Mass Communication Department of Punjab University, Lahore, Waris Mir belonged to that era of Pakistan’s history when no one could dare challenge Gen Zia’s oppressive rule.

Although a beacon valued highly for his contribution to the field of journalism, Waris Mir has yet many facets to his personality that are worth idealization. “While a writer is penning down his concerns, he is not only writing for that particular day or era – he is rather putting together pieces of history for the posterity. But in this age [of Zia dictatorship], when the journalist/writer is not ‘allowed’ to put into black and white what the truth is, what element of precision or accuracy is he going to secure through writings?”, so wrote Waris Mir in one of his articles in 1985.

The greatest contribution of Prof Waris Mir to the decade of retrogression was that he challenged the gospel truth being indoctrinated through state media as the national premise. At that time, the Islamic Goebbels of General Zia’s military regime had firmly established that the founding fathers of Pakistan wanted religion to be the doctrinal spirit of the state and that the PNA’s movement of 1977 was a mandate of the people for it to be made the source of law and life in the state. Waris Mir confronted this official truth? He pleaded through his well-researched and scholarly dissertations that the type of discriminatory and anti-people laws being enforced by the ruling Zia junta was not even correspondent to Islam itself. Islam, as he interpreted it, came in far more progressive than the Goebbels had deemed it to be.

The greatest contribution of Prof Waris Mir to the decade of retrogression was that he challenged the gospel truth being indoctrinated through state media as the national premise.

His finest contribution was a series of articles on women’s rights titled “Kya Aurat Aadhi Hai?” (Are women half a human?) These articles, which were later published in book form, castigated the clergy-sponsored and Zia-backed basis of the discriminatory laws against women, particularly repugnant of which was the new law of evidence which recognized women as half. Waris Mir also proved in the same series of articles that the family laws promulgated by the General Ayub regime were closer to the spirit of Islam than the chauvinistic legislation being proposed by the Jamaat-e-Islami at that time. Prof Waris Mir also defended Westernized educated women and their right to come out of their cloister and the rights of the working woman in the workplace. His best write-ups during those days were about some sensitive issues like press freedom, liberalism and secularism? dictatorship and democracy? referendum, non-party-based elections, constitutional amendments, etc.

From 1985 till his sudden death on July 9, 1987, Prof Waris Mir was doing what he called establishing a tradition of rational discourse. In this period, he dwelt at length on the complex theme of the development of thought in various cultures and the requisites of the state like fundamental human rights and civil liberties granted in the West and made men responsible for it. The recurring pattern in the writings of this period is an enumeration of the objective conditions these ideas were up against and then a proposal of a mode of their application in our circumstances. The writings during this time were totally secular in spirit. They were also a cause of greater discomfort to the rulers because they presented an opposite worldview.

It was only natural that like all heretics of the intellect, Prof Waris Mir should pay a price. He had to face persona non grata in the corridors of the government by losing the prestige of his post at the Punjab University Lahore where he taught journalism. Further personal anguish came when he was harassed in the alma mater that he had served with distinction for decades and his son too was falsely implicated in a murder case by the Islami Jamiat Tuleba at the behest of the Jamaat-e-Islami leadership. He always said that his foes wouldn’t be able to break him, but that probably happened because he died at the young age of 48. He probably knew the price and paid it willingly because once he provoked the analogy of Prometheus in a column saying, “If one has a heart, vultures shall pick”. The man, no doubt, had a heart.

The writer is the Chairman of the Bhutto Legacy Foundation.