My heart was heavy that Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, was killed in so barbaric a fashion; my prayers were and remain with his family. But what was shocking, what appalled me, what struck like a white-hot fist in my chest was the aftermath. It is as if the man’s death was a signal to the country, a thunderous retort to be answered with madness and perverse celebration and cowardice raised as a banner above the nation.
To whom do I address this column? Let it be an open letter to diverse groups.
To the ruling party of this nation: it is a terrible thing to believe your rulers to be heroes and to be disappointed. It is far worse, I have recently discovered, to believe them to be meek and ineffectual, and to be disappointed nonetheless.
How often have you spoken of your courage in the face of extremism, of the great vengeance of democracy, of the martyrdom for grand causes that runs strong through your party lines? Was it not your own party member and MNA Sherry Rehman who put the doomed bill forward? Was it not your government that spoke of amending Zia’s flawed and fatal law? Was it not your governor who was assassinated? And yet, now, in the face of the insanity threatening to devour the country you have accepted stewardship of, your government is spiritedly trying to break the world back-pedalling record. Lance Armstrong may be impressed. We are not.
It is vulgar to quibble over petty gaffes. Let us forget who threatened to shoot blasphemers in the head himself, and who pathetically cringed before the howling wind and flourished his Muslim credentials as a Syed (descendent of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH)). It is beside the main point.
Your comrade was struck down from behind, by a man sworn to protect the state that you represent. You have wrung your hands and you have had your procession. You have expressed, carefully, your grief. Well and good. But the governor of the Punjab was executed in the midst of his security by a smiling madman wearing your colours, whose smug grin fills the nightmares of every sane Pakistani left in this land. Where is your ire? Where is your anger? Where is your wrath? We have not forgotten your bold promise to exterminate terrorism, nor your crushing meekness in handing over Swat — a part of our sovereign nation — to a motley collection of land pirates who believe themselves living in a dystopian seventh century that never happened. The soldiers of 1971 were gifted bangles by women, a gesture meant to shame them for their surrender. This was unfair both to the soldiers, who were hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded, and to women, who suffer so much with so much fortitude. Surely we should present you instead with wreaths, so that when the time comes, you may hang them over our nation’s corpse and mutter your muted words of rehearsed sorrow.
To those lawyers who garlanded the smiling assassin with flowers and laid thousands of offers of free legal counsel at his feet: you have prostrated yourself before a man who is the antithesis of your profession, a man who rejected your entire basis for being — the rule of law. I will not appeal to your morality, professional pride or basic human decency — we are all adults here — but to your inflated sense of self-worth. What price lawyers when they applaud the grossly illegal? In a land without law, you will be a brief and rather underwhelming gang. You are kicking away the ladder of your ascendency while you are still climbing it. There remain good and sane men and women of the law, and I beseech them: corral your wayward colleagues. Like all rabid creatures, they will doom you alongside themselves.
To Mumtaz Qadri and his supporters: the scope of your crimes is frankly staggering. At first glance, you would appear to be mundane murderers, violent and loud and mindless as storms. But not only have you made a free choice to take innocent life, again and again, you have made it a blasphemy to speak against you, and your whims, and the manmade law (amended thrice in the time of Ziaul Haq alone) you so viciously defend. You have appointed yourself ‘divine’ in a religion that suffers no man to be divine, ‘priests’ in a religion that has no scope for priests. How many people here believe not in religion but in you, in your hellish but seductively simple black and white world of violence? You, a band of sociopaths, seek to usurp God Almighty.
We spoke so often of a violent minority and a silent majority, and we always invoked that phrase like a terrestrial prayer, a symbol of our faith in a silent power, not in the heavens but on earth, in our land, existing in the collective soul of a nation. Does it still exist? Did it ever? Or have we truly hurt our people so many times, so badly, that the voices of madmen hold more weight than ours?
And if so, how can we make amends?
We are not without our torchbearers, whose luminescence is all the brighter in this stifling darkness. To the men and women who have taken strong stands, who have come out into the streets, undaunted by the madness outside their homes, to Sherry Rehman and Bilawal Bhutto and others who stand firm as their colleagues wilt from them, to that group of civil society who chooses to fight rather than flee, to the media houses that choose truth over tenor: I salute you for your courage, and stand with you. May you prevail against this crazed zeitgeist, this age of madmen, of cowards.
Hundreds have already argued that the blasphemy laws are manmade, just one among countless scars Zia cut into the nation’s soul. But we cannot forget: this public opinion, this ink-black tide that we fear will drown us in grief and helplessness, is also manmade. It will be neither simple nor quick, but anything of mortal manufacture can be unmade. Anything. Especially something so unstable as a lie.
If we fail, if we flee, if we delay, that iconic picture of the smiling, crazed assassin will become the flag of our times.
The writer is a Lahore-based freelance columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]