Taking it in the 'but' 04 March 2011
Another morning, another assassination. Welcome to Pakistan. On Wednesday afternoon, Federal Minorities Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic, was gunned down soon after he left his parents’ house in Islamabad to go to his nearby office. While the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has taken responsibility for the assassination, much of the apologist commentariat has been hinging its speculation on what has by now become a dreaded word: ‘But’.
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| Shahbaz Bhatti (1968-2011) Photo: foreignpolicy.com |
‘Bhatti might have been gunned down by extremists … but he should have been more careful.’
‘… but he should have chosen his words more wisely.’
‘… but he should have taken his security along.’
‘… but the government should have given him more security.’
… But perhaps, instead of seeking justice for his constituents, he should have shut up and cowered away, the way most member of religious minorities do in today’s Pakistan – a country that is fast on its way to having its soul annihilated.
Nowadays, the dreaded ‘but’ crops up in almost every narrative that is spun around such incidents. As such, the effort by and large is to either lay the onus of the blame at the doorstep of the victim, or to try every other trick in the book to exonerate the real perpetrators of the crime: in this case, religious extremists and their patrons in Rawalpindi. It took less than 10 minutes for the first conspiracy theorist to link Bhatti’s assassination with the CIA and Raymond Davis. Davis was a CIA operative who gunned down two men, allegedly on the ISI’s payroll, on 27 January at a busy intersection in Lahore.
Soon after the news of Bhatti’s death hit the airwaves, bureau chiefs sent out e-mails to a journalists’ mailing list speculating as to whether the CIA had orchestrated the assassination to either ‘take attention away from the Davis case’ or to ‘pressure Pakistan into releasing’ the man. The fact that Bhatti had been getting constant threats ever since he spoke up for Aasia Bibi, the Christian woman convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death last year by a lower court, and the fact that the TTP had left pamphlets at the crime scene detailing their ‘motive’ for the assassination, seems to have been lost on apologists. It is not as if Bhatti had been receiving threats in secret: protesters at countless rallies organised by supposedly banned organisations and pro-fundamentalist groups had been calling for his head quite publicly. But the commentariat would rather blame imaginary monsters under the bed than accept the existence of one that tries its best to be in their faces every day.
The local electronic media’s reaction to the assassination, as far as reportage is concerned, has also been dismal. The assassination of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer in January warranted extended – albeit superficial – coverage for days. Everyone, from the fruit vendor at the murder site to lawyers from the Rawalpindi Bar Association who thought it fit to shower a murderer with rose petals, to the assassin Mumtaz Qadri himself, was interviewed repeatedly, even though they had nothing new to say. Eyewitnesses repeated themselves: they heard shots, turned around and saw the governor on the ground, and Qadri being handcuffed. Qadri kept peddling his own self-righteous inanities, which were echoed and then taken up several notches by lawyers who took it upon themselves to make a mockery of the legal system.
In Bhatti’s case, on the other hand, the initial frenzy to break news was exhausted much sooner. Within a few hours, news of his assassination was relegated to tickers. The treatment of his death as ‘just another headline’ lays bare the fact that bosses at electronic-media organisations did not think Bhatti’s death was ‘shocking enough’. Perhaps they thought it did not matter – Bhatti was, after all, ‘just another Christian’ killed for his beliefs in a country that has long seen the targeting of minorities.
The public’s reaction has also been muted. Sections that took to the social media immediately after Taseer’s assassination to glorify his identified murderer did nothing more this time around, other than parrot popular conspiracy theories fingering the CIA or suggesting that the TTP is a figment of the collective imagination.
The minuscule left and the liberals, on the other hand, have been left gobsmacked. ‘Why did they kill Bhatti? He wasn’t even as vocal as Taseer!’ has been the flavour of this surprise. Indeed, Bhatti might not have been vocal, but the fact that he, a non-Muslim, had dared to stand up and call a spade a spade was, evidently, enough to sign his death warrant.
Progressives’ place
Some have chosen to refer to Bhatti’s martyrdom as the death of hope in Pakistan. But hope could only have been killed if it had existed in the first place. In Pakistan, hope was laid to rest long ago – when the liberal and intellectual elite were forced to cede space to those who would gladly label anyone who did not adhere to their brand of politics as infidels, and kill them. Hope began to die the day state-sanctioned academic syllabi began their task of meshing religion with everything under the sun. When a 12-year-old is taught during chemistry lessons that an atom of oxygen mixes with two atoms of hydrogen with the will of god to form a molecule of water, god-willing and praise be to god, it is not surprising when the same 12-year-old grows up to define every aspect of life through the prism of the most archaic interpretation of dogma.
Further bigotry was instilled via revisionist history textbooks. These seek to create a national identity based solely on Islam, leaving an overwhelming majority to grow up to doubt the patriotism and even the nationality of anyone who does not adhere to the same faith. Friends of this writer who lecture at some of the most ‘elite’ institutions in the country share stories about non-Muslim students being asked by their peers whether they were Pakistani, and if yes, ‘How?’ The non-Muslim students’ concerns are legit, for they have rarely heard much else in the way of political debate, besides the post-1947 mantra of religiocrats who opposed the formation of the country in the first place: ‘Pakistan ka mutlub kia? La ilaha illallah.’ (What does Pakistan stand for? That there is no god but Allah).
At the end of the day, however, very little of the charade currently being played out in Pakistan is about religion. When the country’s military and intelligence establishment choose to patronise extremists in the name of pursuing a myopic strategy of ‘strategic depth’, it is no longer about ideology or religion, but about power and geo-politics. It is about larger players with bigger agendas, which the beleaguered populace is forced to carry on its frail shoulders. Religion is (as it has always been) a tool; fundamentalists, cannon-fodders; and the public-at-large, silent, shocked spectators.
Rallies, meanwhile, are being organised every day to condemn Bhatti’s assassination, thought he same handful of people seem to show up at these demonstrations. They chant the same slogans, light candles and decry injustice. But can these messages of love and peace move an enemy that does not hesitate to pull triggers? Perhaps these rallies and candlelight vigils are progressives’ way of telling themselves that all is not lost yet; that their rage is not as impotent as it might seem, even as the senators condone murder on the floor of the House, bombs tear the country asunder every day, drone attacks continue to kill people, and the massive civilian death toll gets callously discounted as ‘collateral damage’.
Secular political forces, which pretend to take principled stances on various issues, have buried their heads beneath the ground, perhaps hoping that this too shall pass. In their quest for political power, they fail to see how the concept of democracy is being converted into repugnant ‘mobocracy’ by forces seeking to stifle rationality and impose instead, a short-sighted religious identity upon all and sundry. As a friend recently said, the forces of obscurantism and their supporters now have a new message for dissenters: ‘Yeh watan humara hai; tum ko khwam wakha iss mein.’ (This country is ours; you have no place here).
In a few days, perhaps sooner, Bhatti will be just another statistic, part of a rapidly growing list. At the end of the day, after all, Pakistan is not a failed state. It is here to stay; it’s just that it has lost the battle for its soul.
~ The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. Her other writings are online at www.uroojzia.com/work.
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