Pakistan needs a "Deus Ex Machina"*

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi in The Dawn

WHAT is happening to Pakistan? Anyone interested in the question knows the answer. Who is to blame? Opinions differ.

However, there is broad agreement on the cast of culprits: political leaders; political parties; political institutions; non-political institutions; the security and intelligence establishment and its institutions; the civil services; comprehensive corruption; the dysfunctional state of the economy caught in a permanent debt trap and outrageous inequality; complete external dependency and a consequent lack of policy independence; a general lack of education and a scientific outlook; the media contributing to an uninformed, partially informed and misinformed public opinion; the deliberate misuse of religious fervour to obscure the true teachings of our faith; an obsolete social structure preserved by a voracious and unaccountable power structure; a judiciary that demands but does not command universal respect; uncontrollable population growth; irreversible climate change; a forever threat of nuclear annihilation, a security environment that challenges rational resource allocations; palliatives presented as solutions, etc.

We are taught that one should neither hate nor act in anger. This is true as far as persons are concerned. But actions that deliberately undermine the welfare of a whole people can and must be hated. When they threaten the survival of a nation and render its dreams and aspirations impossible they must be confronted by the elemental force of rejection.

If, instead, political observers and commentators couch their opinions in euphemistic and safely coded language they become complicit in the perpetration of a national crime. They convey a pathetic message of resignation, surrender and betrayal. There comes a time when Faiz Ahmad Faiz has to give way to Habib Jalib. Either Quaid-i-Azam was much mistaken or we are all complicit in insulting his memory and murdering his legacy. We prefer, however, to slander the father of our country instead of becoming the citizens it required.

We are today, accordingly, reduced to being spectators of a daily goon or puppet show in the guise of a morality play — without any wit, humour or goodwill. There are no good guys in the unfolding drama of our national tragedy.

The Baloch are killed. Their killers are martyred. When one political character attributes unspeakable and unforgiveable crimes and misdemeanors to his rival we know he speaks the truth. When his rival returns the charges redoubled we know he too speaks the truth. They are of course transparent partners in a single, massive and lethal crime against the people and the country.

So what else is new? What should be new is the realisation that we who are aware and do nothing are just as guilty. If one can live with this realisation so be it. If not, we need to do what we can and without delay. The chances are we won’t. The chances are we have already lost our country. Unless…

Another wasted year of political posturing by rupee multibillionaires representing their victims beckons. While the US contemplates a climate emergency, Pakistan is beset by an existential emergency that commands no contemplation. All the challenges confronting Pakistan will be ignored. Technocratic servants of the elite will continue to spin fairy tales about stabilisation and progress invisible to the eye of the uninitiated. They will be well compensated for dressing their employers in the finery of their analyses and assessments. Other servants or experts will do much the same in their own spheres. The people must learn to eliminate the word ‘sarkar’ from their political dictionary if they are to stand any chance against the forces arrayed against them.

When a country’s ‘leadership’ fails to address fundamental existential issues at home it can have no external policy to speak of. The rest of the world sees this and refuses to take its foreign policy seriously, however well articulated and reasoned it may be. Pakistan has itself become a major stumbling block to the success of its principal foreign policy issue: a principled, peaceful and lasting settlement of the Kashmir dispute with India that is primarily and ascertainably acceptable to the Kashmiri people.

The Kashmiri people cannot defeat India although they have so far heroically denied it the victory it strives for. Pakistan cannot defeat India although its nuclear deterrence capability limits India’s military options. A diplomatic stalemate maximises the suffering of the Kashmiri people. The world is aware of India’s perfidy in Kashmir but is simply not inclined to back a failed or failing Pakistan against the gigantic market and strategic value of what will soon be the world’s most populous country. China, for obvious reasons will continue to back Pakistan against India, while increasingly worried about Pakistan’s inability to learn anything from the amazing experience of its most reliable friend.

The US sees Pakistan as a resentful puppet ruled by dependent elites who will do its bidding even it undermines the confidence of China in Pakistan’s resilience and strategic value.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan backs the Taliban which backs the TTP which perpetrated the massacre of schoolchildren and teachers in the Army Public School on Dec 16, 2014. The army today engages with the TTP, which is essentially a Pakistani branch party of the Afghan Taliban, while refusing to engage with the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement of Manzoor Pashteen which is a Pakistani movement because of its protests against the bombing of Waziristan.

Pakistan has practically no support among the Afghan political intelligentsia, particularly the educated youth who are the future of the country. India has the field to itself.

These absurdities are the direct result of the state of the state in Pakistan. Unless this state of affairs is addressed, foreign policy, indeed all other aspects of national policy, will not be able to develop coherence and credibility. This is all too clear to political observers in Pakistan. But they are by and large easily resigned to the prospect that this state of affairs will not be addressed — and that they will themselves be complicit in this dereliction of duty, citizenship and patriotism. Unless we await a deus ex machina.

* Deus ex Machina - an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel.

On Militant Atheism - Why the Soviet attempt to stamp out religion failed

Giles Fraser in The Guardian



The Russian revolution had started earlier in February. The tsar had already abdicated. And a provisional bourgeois government had begun to establish itself. But it was the occupation of government buildings in Petrograd, on 25 October 1917, by the Red Guards of the Bolsheviks that marks the beginning of the Communist era proper. And it was from this date that an experiment wholly unprecedented in world history began: the systematic, state-sponsored attempt to eliminate religion. “Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy. It is not a side effect, but the central pivot,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Lenin compared religion to venereal disease.

Within just weeks of the October revolution, the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was established to remove all references to religion from school curriculums. In the years that followed, churches and monasteries were destroyed or turned into public toilets. Their land and property was appropriated. Thousands of bishops, monks and clergy were systematically murdered by the security services. Specialist propaganda units were formed, like the League of the Godless. Christian intellectuals were rounded up and sent to camps.

The Soviets had originally believed that when the church had been deprived of its power, religion would quickly wither away. When this did not happen, they redoubled their efforts. In Stalin’s purges of 1936 and 1937 tens of thousands of clergy were rounded up and shot. Under Khrushchev it became illegal to teach religion to your own children. From 1917 to the perestroika period of the 1980s, the more religion persisted, the more the Soviets would seek new and inventive ways to eradicate it. Today the Russian Orthodox churches are packed full. Once the grip of oppression had been released, the faithful returned to church in their millions.

The Soviet experiment manifestly failed. If you want to know why it failed, you could do no better than go along to the British Museum in London next week when the Living with Gods exhibition opens. In collaboration with a BBC Radio 4 series, this exhibition describes some of the myriad ways in which faith expresses itself, using religious objects to examine how people believe rather than what they believe. The first sentence of explanation provided by the British Museum is very telling: “The practice and experience of beliefs are natural to all people.” From prayer flags to a Leeds United kippah, from water jugs to processional chariots, this exhibition tells the story of humanity’s innate and passionate desire to make sense of the world beyond the strictly empirical.

Jill Cook, the exhibition’s curator, remembers going into pre-glasnost churches like Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, which had been converted into a museum of atheism. One of the items she has included in the exhibition is a 1989 velvet and silk embroidered image of Christ, for the back of a cope. The person who made this image had no other vestments to work from – they had all been destroyed – other than those she had seen lampooning Christianity in the museum of atheism. What had been a piss-take has been repurposed into a devotional object. Services resumed in Kazan Cathedral in 1992.

The penultimate image of the exhibition is a 1975 poster of a cheeky-looking cosmonaut walking around in space and declaring: “There is no god.” Below him, on Earth, a church is falling over. This was from the period of so-called scientific atheism.

 A poster showing a cosmonaut walking in space and saying: ‘There is no god.’ By Vladimir Menshikow, 1975. Photograph: British Museum

But there is one last exhibit to go. Round the corner, a glass case contains small model boats with burnt matchsticks in them representing people huddled together. And two tiny shirts that had been used as shrouds for drowned children. At the side of them is a small cross, made from the wood of a ship that was wrecked off the Italian island of Lampedusa on 11 October 2013. The ship contained Somali and Eritrean Christian refugees, fleeing poverty and persecution. Francesco Tuccio, the local Lampedusa carpenter, desperately wanted to do something for them, in whatever way he could. So he did all he knew and made them a cross. Just like a famous carpenter before him, I suppose. And what this exhibition demonstrates is that nothing – not decades of propaganda nor state-sponsored terror – will be able to quash that instinct from human life.

To fight India, we fought ourselves

Mohsin Hamid in The Hindu

At the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration of the militant

On Monday, my mother’s and sister’s eye doctor was assassinated. He was a Shia. He was shot six times while driving to drop his son off at school. His son, age 12, was executed with a single shot to the head.

Tuesday, I attended a protest in front of the Governor’s House in Lahore demanding that more be done to protect Pakistan’s Shias from sectarian extremists. These extremists are responsible for increasingly frequent attacks, including bombings this year that killed more than 200 people, most of them Hazara Shias, in the city of Quetta.

As I stood in the anguished crowd in Lahore, similar protests were being held throughout Pakistan. Roads were shut. Demonstrators blocked access to airports. My father was trapped in one for the evening, yet he said most of his fellow travellers bore the delay without anger. They sympathised with the protesters’ objectives.

Minority persecution is a common notion around the world, bringing to mind the treatment of African-Americans in the United States, for example, or Arab immigrants in Europe. In Pakistan, though, the situation is more unusual: those persecuted as minorities collectively constitute a vast majority.

A filmmaker I know who has relatives in the Ahmadi sect told me that her family’s graves in Lahore had been defaced, because Ahmadis are regarded as apostates. A Baluch friend said it was difficult to take Punjabi visitors with him to Baluchistan, because there is so much local anger there at violence toward the Baluch. An acquaintance of mine, a Pakistani Hindu, once got angry when I answered the question “how are things?” with the word “fine” — because things so obviously aren’t. And Pakistani Christians have borne the brunt of arrests under the country’s blasphemy law; a governor of my province was assassinated for trying to repeal it.

The majority myth

What then is the status of the country’s majority? In Pakistan, there is no such thing. Punjab is the most populous province, but its roughly 100 million people are divided by language, religious sect, outlook and gender. Sunni Muslims represent Pakistan’s most populous faith, but it’s dangerous to be the wrong kind of Sunni. Sunnis are regularly killed for being open to the new ways of the West; or for adhering to the old traditions of the Indian subcontinent; for being liberal; for being mystical; for being in politics, the army or the police; or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration of the militant. Whether fighting in Afghanistan, or Kashmir, or at home, this deadly figure has been elevated to heroic status: willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, able to win the ultimate victory, selfless, noble. Yet as tens of thousands of Pakistanis die at the hands of such heroes, as tens of millions of Pakistanis go about their lives in daily fear of them, a recalibration is being demanded. The need of the hour, of the year, of the generation, is peace.

Pakistan is in the grips of militancy because of its fraught relationship with India, with which it has fought three wars and innumerable skirmishes since the countries separated in 1947. Militants were cultivated as an equaliser, to make Pakistan safer against a much larger foe. But they have done the opposite, killing Pakistanis at home and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic conflicts abroad.

Normalising relations with India could help starve Pakistani militancy of oxygen. So it is significant that the prospects for peace between the two nuclear-armed countries look better than they have in some time.

India and Pakistan share a lengthy land border, but they might as well be on separate continents, so limited is their trade with each other and the commingling of their people. Visas, traditionally hard to get, restricted to specific cities and burdened with onerous requirements to report to the local police, are becoming more flexible for business travellers and older citizens. Trade is also picking up. A pulp manufacturer in Pakistani Punjab, for example, told me he had identified a paper mill in Indian Punjab that could purchase his factory’s entire output.

These openings could be the first cracks in a dam that holds back a flood of interaction. Whenever I go to New Delhi, many I meet are eager to visit Lahore. Home to roughly a combined 25 million people, the cities are not much more than half an hour apart by plane, and yet they are linked by only two flights a week.

Cultural connections are increasing, too. Indian films dominate at Pakistani cinemas, and Indian songs play at Pakistani weddings. Now Pakistanis are making inroads in the opposite direction. Pakistani actors have appeared as Bollywood leads and on Indian reality TV. Pakistani contemporary art is being snapped up by Indian buyers. And New Delhi is the publishing centre for the current crop of Pakistani English-language fiction.

Security hawks

A major constraint the two countries have faced in normalising relations has been the power of security hawks on both sides, and especially in Pakistan. But even in this domain we might be seeing an improvement. The new official doctrine of the Pakistani Army for the first time identifies internal militants, rather than India, as the country’s No. 1 threat. And Pakistan has just completed an unprecedented five years under a single elected government. This year, it will be holding elections in which the largest parties all agree that peace with India is essential.

Peace with India or, rather, increasingly normal neighbourly relations, offers the best chance for Pakistan to succeed in dismantling its cult of militancy. Pakistan’s extremists, of course, understand this, and so we can expect to see, as we have in the past, attempts to scupper progress through cross-border violence. They will try to goad India into retaliating and thereby giving them what serves them best: a state of frozen, impermeable hostility.

They may well succeed. For there is a disturbing rise of hyperbolic nationalism among India’s prickly emerging middle class, and the Indian media is quick to stoke the fires. The explosion of popular rage in India after a recent military exchange, in which soldiers on both sides of the border were killed, is an indicator of the danger.

So it is important now to prepare the public in both countries for an extremist outrage, which may well originate in Pakistan, and for the self-defeating calls for an extreme response, which are likely to be heard in India. Such confrontations have always derailed peace in the past. They must not be allowed to do so again.

In the tricky months ahead, as India and Pakistan reconnect after decades of virtual embargo, those of us who believe in peace should regard extremist provocations not as barriers to our success but, perversely, as signs that we are succeeding.