A question of conscience

NOVEMBER 1996 - If you belong to the minorities in Pakistan, it doesn’t pay to be paranoid. Should you become a victim of that state, you are then in real trouble. The fact is that the dice is loaded against the minorities notwithstanding the high and much-trumpeted praise that we continuously shower on ourselves for our enlightened and tolerant world view of those erring folks who don’t quite see things our way.

Perhaps Dr. Salam’s death in London, the arrival of his body in Lahore, the funeral in the city the same afternoon and the burial in Rabwa the next morning received the kind of coverage we should now expect as the standard fare. Therefore nothing should any more surprise us, but it rankles nevertheless and the spirit lies uneasy. This was no ordinary man and this was no ordinary occasion even after allowing for the disenchantment the majority feels for this particular minority (does it ?). The person who had died in London may have been a practising and believing Ahmedi, but he was also always a Pakistani to his last breath. Not only that, but someone who really cared for this land and whose talent, knowledge and resources were always available to all Pakistanis. That kind of Pakistani, we all know, is just as extinct as the dinosaurs and therefore just as hard to find.

It is not hard to understand the coverage in the national press on Sunday the 24th November, but it is still shameful. The picture of Dr. Salam’s funeral in Lahore that appeared in at least two of the three English national dailies (the third didn’t even bother to run the picture) was taken from an angle that showed the coffin, the gentleman who led the prayers and another dozen mourners behind him. In the corner, the camera captured three or four men idling about, clearly not from the community itself. Was this a picture that was taken in all innocence and it just so happened that the angle which it captured showed that about a dozen people was all that took the trouble to attend the last ‘rites’ (as the papers put it) of the great Dr. Salam ? If it was so, then perhaps the principles that govern the willing suspension of disbelief need to be re-defined. No, the photograph was taken to create an impression and convey a message. Consider this. When the most ordinary folks kick the bucket here, the standard, routine picture that is splashed the next day shows at least the first five rows of mourners who turn up. Even if the crowd is no more than 500, the camera does a pretty decent job of conveying a good turn out. In the case of Dr. Salam’s funeral, by all accounts, there were at least 4,000 to 5,000 people crammed in the mosque on Allama Iqbal Road. Taken from any angle, they would have represented a mammoth turnout, which clearly could not be shown as such. Thus the warped angle. It is sad when things like this happen because a city and its media which can give half a page to the most inane activities and columns and columns to the most mundane events, chooses to ignore the passing away of a great man or treats it almost as if it was not worth reporting. This is not journalism and this is by all standards most shameful. As part of the comfortable majority, I find it difficult to swallow this, though I understand at the same time that hypocrisy is the country’s other name, its pious self-serving sermons aside.

It is just as regrettable that neither the Governor or the Chief Minister could take the chance to be at the Lahore airport when the plane carrying Dr. Salam arrived. Would it have been political suicide to have done so ? Instead, sending two or three token representatives was a graceless act. It would have been far better to have ignored the event altogether. Why do things half way ? Why do them so badly ? Was there the same confusion prevailing in the government’s ranks at Dr. Salam’s death as was reported when he won the Nobel prize many years ago ? Then, there was utter chaos and contradictory statements flew forwards and backwards till we could decide whether to own Dr. Salam or disown him. In the end we sort of owned him, but I am told that Dr. Salam’s acceptance speech at Stockholm was frequently interrupted by ‘Inteezar Farmaeays.’ Apparently the doctor kept quoting from the Holy Book which was dutifully censored by PTV. Great irony, but obviously lost on those whose visionary policies have reduced us to the sorry condition we are in now. I am not a great fan of the 9 pm circus since it is hard to get insulted every night so I am not certain if PTV even covered the last moments of Dr. Salam’s burial, but I do understand that neither were there any TV cameras about and neither did the nation see the 30,000 odd Pakistanis who had thronged to pay their last respects to this land’s first (and probably last) Nobel Prize Laureate.

The state’s running feud with the Ahmedis is a long and bitter one and it is not for hacks like us to comment on its rights and wrongs. I thought we could have all, for one day, ignored which community Dr. Salam belonged to and given him the praise that was his, not because he won that coveted prize but because he was genuinely a great man and an unfliching patriot. However, that didn’t happen. We successfully added another notch to our moral slide which plunges us relentlessly on that treacherous downward slope to the graveyard of those nations which have no conscience and therefore no future.