If Jesus resurrected in Pakistan today, he might have to review his message of ‘Turn thy cheek’. Instead I guess he might ask the Christians there to run for safety.
In fact, the religious minority in Pakistan is wise enough to do that without any divine advice. And they did it when a large mob attacked their neighborhood in the city of Lahore over the weekend, ransacked their homes and businesses, and burnt them down.
All of this was triggered after a Muslim shop owner accused a Christian man, who was running a small business in front of his shop, of committing blasphemy. Police did register a case against the Christian man under the country’s controversial blasphemy law that punishes the responsible with death penalty, but that didn’t satisfy the angry crowd and they decided to punish the entire Christian town with nearly 200 families.
It’s interesting to know that when the Christian families ran for safety, they were sheltered by Muslims in a nearby neighborhood. Those Muslims are part of a majority of Pakistanis who sympathise with minorities, but are helpless to stand up against their crazy cousins for their protection.
And they have reasons to do that.
When it comes to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, or other sensitive religious subjects, even the government seems helpless.
In January 2011, the governor of the Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was murdered by his own bodyguard who thought the governor had committed blasphemy. Two months later that year, a federal minister, a Christian, was gunned down in Islamabad because of his opposition to the controversial law. More recently, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Sherry Rehman, faces a blasphemy charge and was forced to withdraw the legislation she introduced to amend the blasphemy law. And these are just a few high-profile examples.
The mercury of religious intolerance in Pakistan is rising by the day, with no immediate steps to control it. In fact, Pakistan’s most powerful political parties are busy shaking hands with hardline Islamists, who often promote hatred against minorities, for upcoming national elections.
It’s happened again. One more bomb attack in Karachi targeted a mosque in a packed residential complex mostly housing Pakistan’s Shi’ite minority and killed about 45 people. Many women and children were burnt to death in their homes after the explosion.
Right after the blast, the cops, the journalists, and all the regular facebooker and tweeters were waiting to see who claims responsibility for the massacre. The usual suspect in these attacks is a Sunni extremist group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi or LeJ. The group has proudly claimed responsibilities for the past attacks, including the last one in Quetta that killed about 100 people.
I know who is responsible for the attack in Karachi, and the one before in Quetta, and all the other similar attacks that took innocent lives. We all are.
Everyone who has remained silent over this madness that has now grown out of control. Everyone who did not and do not stand up to the hate speeches (all kinds) that come out of the loudspeakers at mosques and political and religious rallies. Everyone who thought it was a good idea to stop one violent movement by raising another violent movement.
I am sorry to say this to all those Facebook and Twitter sympathisers, but just prayers won’t stop this. It never has and never will. The problem is in Pakistan and only the people of Pakistan have the ability to solve it. And they should start by first recognizing that there is a problem.
But it’s unfortunate to see it’s political and religious leaders busy preparing for their strategies for the next elections to get the most votes.
This weekend there was a near complete blackout in Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan with a population of about 18 million. It wasn’t just Karachi. People in other cities too were without electricity for many hours. And it’s nothing rare for a population that is used to of daily, multi-hour power breakdowns.
That’s not a problem to me. The real problem is: nobody gives a damn about taking that problem seriously. The recent darkness in Karachi was lifted in a day, but the real darkness of ignorance and inability of it’s leaders to take up a wolf pack of problems is getting thicker by the day.
Look up a few Pakistani news papers online and you’ll find it’s political leaders busy ganging up to take the most out of the upcoming general elections.
If there is anything that unites Pakistan’s left and right, it’s wackos (all kinds), it’s rural pharaohs and urban thugs, it is their common greed to stay in power.
Only a few weeks back, everyone seemed to have reached their tipping point over the massacre of religious minorities, now they are looking for their power points.
And in the next few weeks it will be something else.
A latest bomb attack has killed nearly 90 people, mostly Shi’ites, in Pakistan. And if you add up about 100 deaths last month that were a result of a similar bomb explosion and a few targeted killings here and there, the body count has crossed 200 this year. And it’s only been two months. According to one report, about 400 Shi’ites were killed in Pakistan in 2012.
Who killed them? No mystery. A Sunni extremist group (Lashkar-e-Jhangvi) has claimed responsibility like it did for similar attacks in the past.
Why were they killed? No mystery. Sunni extremists hate Shi’ites in general, just like Shi’ite extremists hate Sunnis in general.
Unfortunately, Pakistan has a perfect environment for these extremists groups to kill innocent men, women and children. Many religious schools teach their students nothing but hatred against minorities. What next? You need a gun or a bomb. There is no shortage of that. What next? A soft target: markets, schools, places of worship. What next? No fear of the good guys (police - the good ones) coming after you. I don’t remember a single case where someone has been convicted of sectarian killings in Pakistan.
Just after the recent killings of Shi’ites, I spoke with someone in Pakistan who was more concerned about Sunni mosques not allowed to be built in Iran (a Shi’ite state) and some religious scholars (Sunni scholars) being killed in Karachi.
The fact is, as long as the majority of Pakistanis keep worrying only about their petty interests, there will be no end to the sufferings of the minorities, and eventually the majority as well.
Going through the bombardment of news reports and opinions that came right after Pope Benedict announced his resignation, you could find many angles to the story. Why did he leave? How could he (the chosen one) leave? Who will be next? A black pope? An Asian pope? A Muslim pope? (I joked with one of my colleagues) and then there was this: Detain the pope.
An old article by Christopher Hitchens argues why the pope should be brought to justice for harboring holy men who are accused of pedophelia or some other sex charges.
I had hardly heard about the idea of putting the father into the confession box and that there were actual lawsuits pending against some clergies.
Why would some people think it’s not fair to bring the holy men under the laws that were made after countless of sacrifices. After all, people have fought, bled, died, facebooked and tweeted for democracies around the world. It’s only fair to treat everyone equally, something God likes.
And while the story of all Christian and Jewish holy men facing the music may still be far from over, the story of their Muslim counterparts hasn’t even started.
The recent story of a Saudi preacher sexually assaulting and killing his five-year-old daughter and reports of him escaping punishment by paying ‘blood money’, is a chilling reminder of the task ahead.
It’s not official yet, but if a local report is to be believed the Taliban have set up courts in Pakistan’s largest city: Karachi.
Isn’t it kinda cool? Everything will be so easy now. There will be lots of jobs for new judges, you wouldn't have to have a special training or degree to become a judge, there won’t be those expensive attorneys, you could be your own attorney, no books read, no precedents followed, there will be no endless hearings (the Taliban like a speedy justice system), and the best part is: it will save a huge amount of money to a broke country, because there will be no forensics, no medical examinations and the justice will be right there, right then. Although there’s one little problem: you wouldn’t be able to appeal in many cases. It’s a little hard to put one’s head back to where it was after it’s chopped off.
This may still look like a joke to a lot of people, like it did when the marching mullahs hadn’t reached other cities of Pakistan, but it is a reality. Like it is a reality in Afghanistan, in many northwestern areas of Pakistan and in some African countries.
And all of these places have one thing in common: an ineffective government with a screwed up justice system.
The only thing surprising about the Taliban courts in Pakistan to me is the madness they operate in. Otherwise the idea of a parallel judicial system is pretty old in Pakistan. Many political and religious parties have had their local courts or judicial system in place. And who doesn’t know about the ‘jirga’ system in Pakistan’s rural areas, where a bunch of old guys settle domestic issues under a tree, sometimes ordering the most brutal punishment to women and the poor.
People will either choose or be forced to go to these courts if the regular courts are a pain in the back. The overall court conviction rate in Pakistan is very poor.
So until Pakistan’s judicial apparatus takes strong roots, stories of the Taliban courts, jirgas and vigilante justice will be regular.
And just an FYI, if you ever have to appear before a Taliban judge, don’t show him you finger.
In 2008, I met a Hindu family in a desert area of Pakistan’s Sindh province. The family was ‘food insecure’: meaning they didn’t have enough to eat. Mangal Ram, who was the family head with seven children, told me that whenever his kids asked for more food, he would make empty promises. That was the year when there were 77 millions ‘food insecure’ people in Pakistan, according to the World Food Program. That was also the year when I hadn’t heard of Muslims celebrating the birth of Prophet Muhammad by cutting a cake.
Today things have changed for the people in Mangal Ram’s club. The population of ‘food insecure’ people in Pakistan is estimated to be 90 million, a little more than half of it’s population. And the cakes are getting bigger: 5,000 pounds according to a local report.
In Pakistan, that and many other stories are the reflection of the widening gap between those who ‘have’ and those ‘who will never have’.
In a recent chat, the World Food Program’s country representative in Pakistan, Jean-Luc Siblot, told me that children under the age of five are bearing the major brunt of this food insecurity. He said if their bodies don’t get nutritioned well in the first two years since their birth, their brains don’t develop as much as the healthy kids’ brains do. And if you look at it scientifically, he said, those ‘malnutritioned’ brains are 40 percent less developed than healthy brains. And what’s worse is that this damage is irreversible. Siblot said that mean’s you can feed them with the best food in the world, but their brains will never develop.
The population of those children in Pakistan is about 15 percent of the population of children under 5 years of age.
What surprises me the most is that this is happening in a country that claims to produce enough wheat for its entire population. According to one report, Pakistan is the sixth largest wheat producer in the world.
So what’s the problem or problems? Poverty, bad wealth distribution, horrible security, terrible infrastructure and so on.
And to solve these problems, Pakistan’s government and the people have to take serious steps to stop this deteriorating trend. And to take those steps the country has to have political and economic stability. Or else, the cakes will keep getting bigger and the Rams will be thinner.
