istory
has consistently shown up the dangers of mixing faith and power. The
heady potency of kingdoms or states that also seek the additional
legitimacy of spiritual supremacy over those they rule inevitably
leads them to commit some transgressions. In more modern times
defining nationhood or citizenship through the narrow focus of
religious identity is almost always manifested in iniquitous living
and discriminatory forms of existence for those, especially religious
or ethnic minorities and conscientious dissenters, who live outside
the accepted or sanctified labels.
If Pakistan’s tryst with its minorities was doomed
at its inception as a monochromatic state, this position was
legitimised by the Objectives Resolution which laid out the principles
for its future Constitution. The Objectives Resolution declared
Pakistan to be an Islamic republic not just in nomenclature but in
practice and its first Constitution prohibited non-Muslims from
occupying key positions in government. Subsequent and more recent
developments have worsened the lives of its Hindu, Christian and
Ahmadiyya minorities.
A comprehensive report recently brought out by the
Jinnah Institute, Islamabad, which we bring you as our cover story of
the month, traces this dubious legacy through the three Constitutions
of 1956, 1962 and 1973 which increasingly demarcated citizenship
within Pakistan into the discriminatory categories of Muslim and
non-Muslim. While the speech of the creator of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali
Jinnah, to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in August 1947 has
often been quoted by some to emphasise that minorities had freedom
within Pakistani shores, the fact that even at its inception the
Constitution did contain such an Objectives Resolution underlines the
hierarchical tiers of citizenship within that state. This inequity was
further entrenched during the military regime of Zia ul-Haq who
through an amendment incorporated the resolution as Article 2A of the
Pakistani Constitution.
Today Pakistan’s institutions struggle with robust
attempts at democracy and representation while battling not just an
army and intelligence that is bequeathed with obsessive and
unprofessional levels of ideologically driven training. Pakistani
people and politicians who genuinely seek democracy are forced to
battle with cultivated mafias of religious extremism. Far worse,
Pakistan’s legal system and its judiciary, institutionalised state
bodies such as the Federal Shariat Court and the Council of Islamic
Ideology together with laws like the blasphemy law in its statute
book, provide the strongest resistance to political reform and
representative democracy.
If under these cruel circumstances the challenges
that face Pakistan – not just to survive but to emerge as a healthy
and stable neighbour – appear near insurmountable, the bitter
bloodshed in faraway Oslo from a man who believed that by shooting
dead young men and women he could draw attention to both his and a
widening group’s hatreds and obsessions provides another dimension to
the same discourse.
For several hundred years at least, some men and
women born into privilege and power have believed that only by tightly
controlling societies and their impulses would they preserve the
purity of their own. Bitter segregation and caste-based exclusion that
decreed fellow beings to the inhuman task of handling human excreta
and denied them any other vocation was one such systemic
manifestation. A politics that believes that the purity of the white
race – or any other – can be maintained not just by exclusion but by
serious incursions on privacies and personal freedoms is another such
manifestation.
The man with the gun in Oslo who has stunned his
nation by his calculated stream of bullets has drawn the world’s
attention to the universal similarity and weaknesses of these thought
processes. No society, nor any faith, either in the past or in the
present day, can claim to be free of this supremacist tendency, not
Hinduism nor Buddhism nor Islam or Christianity or Judaism or any
other. Today’s victims can at any time become tomorrow’s bitter
aggressors. Religion-based nationhood or citizenship and societies not
enriched by the vibrancy of linguistic, ethnic and religious variety
are the danger. We have lived examples in our midst. All the more
reason now more than ever to talk the language of sanity and
rationality, not hatred.
Hate Hurts, Harmony Works
