by Shanie
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| Pakistani lawyers hold rose petals as they chant slogans in support of arrested Pakistani bodyguard Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, the alleged killer of Punjab's governor Salman Taseer, while they wait for him outside an anti-terrorist court in Rawalpindi on January 6, 2011.- Getty Images |
(January 08, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Pakistan has gone through yet another political assassination. Salman Taseer, Governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was gunned down by one of his own bodyguards. Taseer was an outspoken liberal critic of the religious intolerance that is fast becoming a part of Pakistan’s political culture. Last year, when a mosque of the minority Ahmadi sect was bombed in Punjab, Taseer condemned it in no uncertain terms. He said at that time: "Extremist people are not in a majority. This is a very narrow minority, but….they are always prepared to do and die. That is their strength." He went on to add that religious extremism could be quashed only by ‘the continuous, functional positions of a democratic system.’
In November last year, a woman was sentenced to death under Pakistan’s infamous blasphemy laws promulgated in the 1980s by the military dictator Zia ul-Haq, Taseer was quick to protest. He not only sought a pardon for her but went further in calling for the repeal of the blasphemy laws. He was to say last month: "My observation on minorities is this. A man/nation is judged by how they support those weaker than them, not how they lean on those stronger." Taseer’s assassin has openly stated that he killed the person for whom he was tasked to provide security because of his master’s stance on blasphemy laws. The worrying aspect of this assassination is that there are many in Pakistan who have publicly praising the assassin. Indeed, when the man was produced in the courts, some lawyers had showered him with rose petals. They may only be a narrow minority as Taseer said, but their strength is in that they are vocal and have no qualms about engaging in violence. This is true not only of Pakistan but of most countries around the world, including Sri Lanka.
The partition of the sub-continent
Pakistan’s difficulties arose from the circumstances of her very birth as a nation. The Indian sub-continent was partitioned in 1947 as a result of a deal among the political leadership of the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad was a prominent Muslim leader within the Congress and was the President of the Congress from 1940 to 1946. He became independent India’s first Minister of Education, a position he held until his death in 1958. A year before his death, he had completed his political memoirs , a task which he accomplished with the assistance of Humayun Kabir, a distinguished academic who served as Maulana Azad’s secretary and who was later to become a cabinet minister himself. In his autobiography, Maulana Azad writes with anguish at the partition of India, which he had opposed all along. He was certain that the people of India (Hindus and Muslims) were not in favour of partition; ‘their heart and soul rebelled against the very idea.’ Even many Muslims in the Muslim League were horrified by the results of partition and said openly that this was not what they had meant by partition.
Maulana Azad writes: ‘When reviewing the situation ten years after partition, I find that events have confirmed what I said at that time. It was even then clear to me that the Congress leaders had not accepted partition with a free and open mind. Some had accepted it out of sheer anger and resentment and others out of a sense of despair. Men when they are swayed by indignation or fear cannot judge objectively.’ Jawaharlal Nehru was more explicit when he stated: ‘Pakistan came into existence on the basis of hatred and intolerance. We must not allow ourselves to react to this in the same way. That surely will be a defeat for us. We have to live up to our immemorial culture and try to win over those who are opposed to us. To compete with each other in hatred and barbarity is to sink below the human level and tarnish the name of our country and our people. One evil deed leads to another. Thus evil grows. That is not the way to stop these inhuman deeds. If we can behave with tolerance and friendship to each other, that surely will have its effect elsewhere. If not, this vicious cycle will go on bringing sorrow and disaster to all of us and to others…..I earnestly trust that our efforts will be directed towards creating communal harmony and that all our people and especially our newspapers will appreciate the grave dangers that are caused by communal conflict and disharmony. Let us all be careful in what we say or write lest it create fear and conflict.’
Independent India was fortunate that she had a liberal and far-sighted leadership in people like Gandhi, Nehru and Maulana Azad. Not so independent Pakistan. While Pakistan opted for a constitution that recognized Islam as the state religion, India opted for becoming a secular republic. With an 80% Hindu majority and given the religious conflicts at the time of independence, it would have been easy for the political leadership of India to pander to Hindu sentiments. But, with great statespersonship, they decided neither to make Hinduism the state religion nor to give it the ‘foremost place.’ This difference in approach between Pakistan and India at the time of independence explains why India remains a vibrant democracy enjoying communal and religious harmony that few other newly independent countries can match; whereas Pakistan remains bogged down by religious intolerance with more than half her post-independent years under military dictators.
Lessons for Sri Lanka
All this has lessons for countries like Sri Lanka. Fascists and extremists led the Tamils away from democracy and pluralism. They were helped in this by fascists and extremists among the Sinhala establishment who lacked the vision of a Gandhi or a Nehru or a Maulana Azad. Almost soon after independence, short-sighted politicians found the destruction of communal harmony and tolerance in our country a short-cut to political power. And we still do not seem to have learnt the lessons of that history. Fascism and extremism rule the roost. The Eighteenth Amendment extending the authoritarianism of the Executive Presidency has been meekly accepted both by Parliament and the Judiciary. Sarath Fonseka, the Army Commander who led the military battle against the fascist LTTE, languishes in jail still awaiting justice. The right of the Tamil people to sing the national anthem at official functions in their own language is withdrawn for inexplicable reason. The ordinary citizen in the North is still to experience the "massive development" that government politicians and their apologists talk about. In the meantime, the ICRC and other NGOs engaged in aid and relief are ordered to withdraw from the North. Elsewhere, development seems to mean inviting foreign and local investors to set up shangri-las, casinos, etc at the expense of evicting the low-income residents from the city. Living costs have seen a sharp increase; the list is endless. The government must decide on its priorities and grapple with addressing them. Mouthing slogans and rhetoric and abusing those who criticize will not make the many problems go away.
The Milinda Prasna
Some recent newspaper articles have referred to the conversation between King Milinda and the monk Nagasena from an ancient Pali text and which was included in the Civil Rights Movement’s publication ‘The Value of Dissent’. It will be valuable to re-read the full text:
‘The King said: "Bhante Nagasena, will you converse with me?"
"Sire, if you will converse with me after the fashion of the wise, I will. But if you converse with me as kings converse, I will not."
"How, Bhante Nagasena, do the wise converse?"
"Sire, when the wise converse, whether they become entangled in their opponent’s arguments or extricate themselves, or whether they or their opponents are shown to be in error, and whether their own superiority or that of their opponents is proved, none of these things can make them angry."
"And how, Bhante, do kings converse?"
"Sire, when kings converse they put forward a proposition, and if any should oppose it they order his punishment saying, ‘Punish this fellow!"
"Bhante, you are right. I will converse as the wise do, not as kings do. Let your reverence converse with me in all confidence. Let your reverence converse with me as unrestrainedly as if with a Bhikkhu, a novice, a lay disciple or a keeper of the monastery grounds. Have no fear!"
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