The Fires of Hate

JUNE 2004 - The message from Karachi should be clear to all. If you are a Muslim, don’t pray in a mosque. In ‘Islam-enemy’ India, you can. In ‘the citadel of Islam’ you can’t. If you must pray, do it at home. Even guards with lethal weapons cannot prevent Muslims from killing you. This is our ‘Soft Side’ as exhibited to the world.

In a week and more, we have watched in silence as Muslims have turned upon one another in an orgy of killing and destruction. That this should happen in a city that was once the pride and joy of this country, is one of the many sad ironies of our predicament. While theories abound, from the absurd to the lamentable, there is more noise, more hot air and more platitudes from their Excellencies. They have wasted little time in issuing bland and largely pointless statements. No one has any real solution. The power brokers are cobbling unlikely alliances and the General watches from the safety of Camp Office, Rawalpindi Saddar. The Leader of the Opposition – the blind leading the blind, emerges from yet another round of negotiations for more power with this Makhdom or that, and if the killings in Karachi are eating him up, miraculously it doesn’t show. He looks large, well-fed, content and affluent and has a grin that any Cheshire cat would give its right paw for. Karachi will soon be confined to the collective bin of our decay and thereafter, replaced by some other act of madness or derangement that will last the few moments before it too is overtaken by further violence.

Of course you can walk away from Karachi – as we have been doing with everything that doesn’t quite go the way we want it to go, but all those who continue to think like this will live to rue it. For years, holdups and robberies was something that happened to remote, faceless people in far flung areas and localities whose names you had not heard. Then, it began to change. The faceless people soon had identities that you could relate to. The far-flung areas were frighteningly near and the list of people victimized simply kept growing. Friends, acquaintances, relatives began to appear with disturbing regularity on the list. Today, it is not possible for anyone to claim blissful ignorance when acts of violence, killing and robbing take place. Walking away is simply no longer possible. The month of May in Karachi has unleashed the hatred and the intolerance that is no longer even skin deep. It is a matter of shame – though shame there isn’t in any of us, that we paid a heavy price of millions of lives to make a country on a basis that becomes more and more disputable day by day, so that we could practice our religion and supposedly our ideals, free from the pressures of a larger and more powerful majority. That this desire led to the largest exodus in the history of mankind and arguably, the bloodiest is part of our blood-soaked history, but look what we have done with this beginning. Mr. Jinnah lies six feet under, just a few hundred yards from where last week his people hurled bombs, unleashed a hailstorm of death-soaked bullets, torched vehicles and looted properties – all in the name of their religion and to passionately exhibit the hatred they feel for those who don’t quite agree with their interpretation of it. But poor Mr. Jinnah is out of it forever. His legacy is torn apart, his dream in tatters and his people, riven apart to an extent that would make enemies look friendly. The people who matter and who are able to churn the basest passions in mobs, seem to have an insatiable lust for killing. There is no room for discussion or debate in their world. It’s black or white. There is no question of another opinion if it’s not the same as yours.

This is not the age of enlightenment but the age of darkness that engulfs Pakistan. The General, who has latched on to ‘Enlightened Moderation,’ but as Ayaz Amir rightly points out, moderation is in essence enlightened otherwise it would not be moderation, is dreaming of a Pakistan where a calm and gentle breeze will soothe the fevered brows, miraculously heal all the wounds and restore hope to those who have lost all hope, but sadly slogans don’t change things. And manipulated systems don’t work. As for slogans, you can peddle ‘The Soft Side’ of Pakistan till kingdom come, strut fashion divas on the catwalks of the world and make impressive power point presentations about the rich cultural heritage of our land that stretches back over 5,000 years, but it will add up to a very large and a very formidable zero. The bitter truth is that we are not enlightened and will never be – not for a long, long time to come. There is too much that’s gone wrong and we have wandered off too often into the wastelands to ever hope of regaining lost ground. We are a country in self-denial. We do not qualify to be called a nation because that requires some pre-conditions, which have evaporated from our midst like a drop of water does on a hot stone in Jacobabad in the middle of June. There are too many self-serving planners making too many plans for Pakistan’s good. The only vision that matters is self-vision and the only interest that thrives is self-interest. Truth, pragmatism and integrity to name three are contraband items. Flattery serves everyone marvelously and to its hordes of growing practitioners, it brings fame, power and money. The fat cows get fatter. The rewards they reap are mostly undeserving, but then those are the rewards that grow best here.

I have not heard people in Karachi talk with such despondency as these past many days. There is a fatalistic resignation that is frightening and depressing. People are convinced more than ever before that we have fallen apart at the seams that this curious half-hippo, half-giraffe model of governance that has been hoisted on our sagging shoulders, is not ever going to work. The amount of time, effort and energy that the country wastes in the endless debates about what will and will not work, has reached proportions that are intolerable, but since most people are powerless to change things, they bow out, withdraw and leave homes. We have one life and most people do dream of living it well, but when the State throws in the towel and surrenders its already fragile hold on two most basic duties entrusted to it – law and order, then the ship is sinking and all decent rats must jump ship. The Punjab Assembly, bless it black heart, passed a pious and sanctimonious resolution, expressing its sorrow over the Karachi carnage and offering prayers for their bloodied countrymen blown apart as they prayed to the same God. Surely the MPAs must have solemnly and reverently closed their eyes in mock-piety to commune with their Maker and sought divine forgiveness, but that resolution or Islamabad’s ‘concern’ is not what Karachi needs. Those who are dead and buried are gone but has the Interior Minister who has just now surfaced after his holy hiatus, any idea of the turmoil into which hundreds of families have been thrown? Three police officials are transferred in Sindh – but those who should be held responsible and made to quit (since they won’t voluntarily), are firmly in place, watching with beady eyes which power group offers a better deal. Something is horribly rotten and it is not in Denmark.