An inner turbulence

In which direction is Pakistan moving, socially, politically and ideologically? And will the Aurat March, a celebration to be held in our major cities in about two weeks’ time, provide some sense of it?

Meanwhile, Pakistan is a country whose federal minister for religious affairs has formally asked the prime minister to re-christen the Aurat March as International Hijab Day.

Noorul Haq Qadri’s letter has sparked a debate in the media, with social activists and some politicians expressing their annoyance over its contents. It is reassuring that the minister’s petition is not to be accepted. Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry has supported the Aurat March. It is possible that the religious minister was encouraged by conservative views about the freedom and empowerment of women expressed by the prime minister some time ago. It seems, also, that he has not correctly understood the meaning and implications of the Hijab controversy in India.

But some kind of confrontation is likely to build up between the progressive and conservative religious elements. On Friday, the Islamabad president of the JUI-F made a statement against the celebration and even threatened to stop the Aurat March by force.

However, I did not intend to focus exclusively on Pakistani women’s struggle for emancipation and its linkage with our ruling ideas – if these ideas can be explicitly deciphered. After all, the present minister of religious affairs is also meant to project these ideas in what he says and does.

I wish to take the larger picture into account – and that would include the sudden upsurge in political activity and the opposition’s determination to oust Imran Khan through a no-confidence motion in the National Assembly. Are things happening in the dark and behind the curtain? The tempo has reached a level that Imran Khan has launched his own campaign. His public rally in Mandi Bahauddin on Friday was a spirited counter-offensive, an action replay of his obsessive tirade against the Sharifs.

But what is happening beyond politics is larger in its magnitude. There is an inner turbulence in Pakistani society, flaring up in many different forms. Look carefully and you find one nerve-shattering incident after another. Violence is at the heart of all our derelictions. Again and again, there is an eruption of primitive passions lurking in the lives of ordinary citizens. Violent crime is rising, particularly in Karachi. Sex crimes and ‘honour killings’ are reported more frequently.

Blinkered by their own national security constructs, our rulers do not seem to have grasped the extent of social disorder that their own policies and deeds may have nurtured. Outrage expressed over specific incidents, such as the murder of a senior journalist in Karachi in a robbery attempt on Friday, calms down in a few days when something more chilling takes place.

Let me only quote the intro of a Karachi dated report published on Thursday in a newspaper’s inside page: “The body of a three-year-old who had gone missing on Feb 13 was found in a Shah Faisal Colony nullah on Wednesday, police and hospital officials said. They said the boy was assaulted before being murdered”.

Similar reports that I could gather from the media during the past one week or ten days would easily overflow the confines of this column. Besides, I want to make some observations on major acts of barbarism that would likely oblige the rulers to sit up, take notice and do something.

Yes, on such occasions that do sit up and make thunderous promises of not allowing that crime to be committed again. Remember what Imran Khan had said after the lynching of Sri Lankan citizen Priyantha Kumara in Sialkot in the first week of December – a crime that shook the nation? He said: ”As long as I am alive, I will not allow incidents like Sialkot lynching to happen again”.

Well, it has happened again, just about ten weeks after the Sialkot tragedy, which was not the first lynching on suspicion of blasphemy and could not be the last, as observers of the country’s social drift were saying. On Saturday last week, a middle-aged man was stoned to death by a mob in a remote village of Khanewal district. The man, mentally sick, was alleged to have desecrated the Holy Quran.

Again, the nation was shocked and scores of persons who had participated in the lynching were arrested. The prime minister took notice and said ‘zero tolerance’ would be shown to the perpetrators of the crime. But will it be the last such incident? Very unlikely, unless the rulers take drastic steps almost amounting to a paradigm shift in national policies with reference to how religion is exploited in politics. It may be a sacrilege to argue that history prescribes a secular dispensation for Pakistan. But these issues cannot even be discussed in a rational manner.

There is another report that describes the reality of Pakistan in terms of its aversion to progressive social change. Two women were kidnapped, paraded naked and then gang-raped near Naukot in district Mirpurkhas on Saturday night last week. It was an act of revenge, after a love marriage in that tribal setting. And, yes, arrests have been made and justice promised.

Still, this has happened in 2022, as many as 38 years after that national shame of Nawabpur where a group of women was paraded naked in March 1984. Not only that, it was in 2002, twenty years ago, when Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped in a remote village of Muzzafargarh on the orders of a village council as revenge for her younger brother’s alleged relationship with a woman of the other tribe.

Mukhtar Mai was a hero because she stood up for her rights and her story made headlines across the world. She is now an activist. But we do not know if those who wield power can also be on her side – and be with her in the Aurat March? Or will nothing change?

The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com