Daily Times

I originally wanted to write about the election results this week, but this rigged election is no longer worth writing about. Immortan’s half-life war boys and girls are welcome to their chance at ruining the country further. May they succeed in proving me wrong though I doubt it. There is much more to life than talking about the power politics in this hapless country of ours given that the true fountainhead of power in this country does not lie in the people anyway. Life is too short to engage in wild fantasies that things will change in the way we have chosen to run this wretched place. All hail the Lord of the Citadel. All hail Immortan.

Far more important is how disgustingly inhumane we have become as a society. For some reason the use of animals in political rallies has strangely been very common in politics. Yet there was always a certain amount of restraint and compassion towards the animal. Just before independence the Frontier Muslim League had taken out a rally with an elderly pet stork dressed as Mahatma Gandhi as its comic mascot to entertain the crowds. Though there was no report of any physical abuse of the stork, the stork died the next day of exhaustion. In the aftermath of 1965 elections when Field Marshall Ayub Khan defeated Fatima Jinnah in a rigged election, the president’s son Gohar Ayub paraded a female dog with a lantern around its neck as an insult to the sister of the father of the nation. It is not known what became of that dog. PML-N used a white tiger as its mascot during its 2013 campaign. The white tiger died of exhaustion, heat and noise induced stress three days before the Election Day. To its credit, the PML-N did not repeat the fiasco this time around.

A society is only as good as its most marginalised and voiceless are. Animals are the most voiceless of all living things

This election campaign was different though. After our Prime Minister Select described PML-N supporters as donkeys, his half-life war boys of PTI got hold of a donkey on which they spray-painted Nawaz and beat it to pulp. Not content with this, they even rammed it with a vehicle. The Ayesha Chundrigar Foundation (ACF), which is an animal rescue group, tried to save it but the animal died. Looking at the pictures of the donkey were heart breaking enough but nothing prepared us for what came after the elections. A worker of the QWP put a PTI a flag on a rather harmless looking and scared out of its wits dog and then shot it to death shooting at it repeatedly. This was captured on video. The fear and the pain of the writhing animal are all captured on that video that at least kept even a heartless person like me up all night. I saw the video once but I haven’t been able to get out of my head. The utter cruelty with which this disgusting specimen of humanity went about killing an animal who did nothing wrong and was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time!

Kudos to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Police who arrested him and I hope they will vigorously prosecute him for this crime. The British — for whatever we may say about them — did enact a law in 1890 to prevent animal cruelty in the subcontinent called the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals Act 1890. It is a fascinating law, no doubt designed largely to respect the local views on animals. It has provisions even to protect against phooka or dooma dev. This is still the law in Pakistan. However it needs to be amended and updated. Any and all violence against dogs, cats, dogs and monkeys should be punishable with a fine and imprisonment. Furthermore, even slaughter of animals for meat should be strictly regulated to ensure that it is done in a humane manner. The state should also provide patronage to those groups that are working for animal welfare.

Growing up, my favourite story was Khawaja sag parast from medieval Persia. It was a story of a man who was betrayed again and again by his brothers but saved by his dog. Ultimately, he caged his brothers like animals and kept his dog in luxury. I never thought of myself as a misanthrope, but events such as those above have brought me to the edge of becoming one. Even our neighbour India, despite all its love for cows and cow protection laws, has always been rife with horrific stories of animal cruelty. In 2016 woman once smashed an entire litter of puppies against the wall to teach a stray dog a lesson for giving birth outside her house. The same year medical students threw a dog off a terrace just to unwind. So the issue is not necessarily unique to Pakistan, though one wonders if it is unique to South Asians as a people.

A society is only as good as its most marginalised and voiceless are. Animals are the most voiceless of all living things. They are placed in our care. Remember they have no political ideology or religion. We who speak of Islam from morning to evening have reduced the meaning of the faith to strict moral codes based on time specific interpretations. The true spirit of Islam is that Ummayad Caliph Umar Bin Abdul Aziz (RA) considered the well being of even a dog in his dominion his responsibility. It is all well and good to speak of creating a New Medina in Pakistan but it is much harder to implement the timeless humane principles that we were once taught was the true essence of the great faith that the majority of citizens of this country follow.

In any event whatever you choose to do to each other for the sake of religion, politics, ethnicity and whatever else it is that rouses the murderous streak in you, spare the animals for god’s sake. No religion endorses cruelty to animals. Animals have no politics, no ethnicity and no language.

The writer is a practising lawyer and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School in Cambridge MA, USA. He blogs at http://globallegalforum.blogspot.com. Twitter @therealylh

Published in Daily Times, July 30^th 2018.