The country we forgot to meet

Even six and a half decades after it was created, we really know too little about the country we live in. How many of us, for instance, realised that thousands of Christians and Hindus lived in North Waziristan.

Even some of those present as relief staff at camps concede that the appearance of some 2000 non-Muslims amongst the half million IDPs who have poured out of NWA in the wake of the military operation there took them rather by surprise. The fact, of course, is that while the tribal areas are technically a part of Pakistan, we know too little about them or their people. We see them essentially as caricatures, turbaned tribals who live by some code of their own. We do not seem to realise that just like humans everywhere the people of the seven tribal agencies want opportunity, education, justice and peace. The women share in this and seek a different kind of life to the one they lead.

There have been surprises as people pour out from the hidden depths of what remains in many ways a ‘secret’ country, and what we hear comes against expectations. The Christians and Hindus from North Waziristan, most of them from the Miranshah area, say that while they were occasional incidents of harassment they were as a group not especially badly treated by the Taliban. In many ways they seem to have fared better than their counterparts in other parts of the country.

While this is not true for the entire tribal belt, where there are small populations of Sikhs and of course different minority sects, the stories from North Waziristan are telling. They suggest that what puts us most at risk is the Talibanisation of minds in other parts of the country and the absorption of warped belief borrowed from all kinds of places and spread by a variety of groups.

An example of this comes in the account of a young Christian boy in Lahore who says that following the Israeli actions against Palestinians he was dismissed from his job after being beaten by his employers on the ground that his religion made him an ally of the US and of Israel. The boy, barely educated and aged around 14, has little idea of what he is being blamed for. His highly educated former employers, who he also says frequently abused and mistreated him previously, should of course know better. There is much reason to protest what is happening in Palestine but a teenage Christian from among the most impoverished community in our country cannot possibly have anything to do with this.

With the minority from North Waziristan explaining that on the whole they were given respect and permitted to practice their belief we need to ask where such thinking is being bred. In the case of the Christian boy those who hired him had obviously not attended madressahs and had in fact worked at highly respectable organisations. Somehow, however, we have created a society within which immense discrimination and a lack of logic prevails. In many ways – to use a cliché – we have fallen back into the medieval times. Even the Taliban, or at least some groups amongst them, seem more humane than a growing number of ordinary people in the country.

So what exactly went wrong? It would need a detailed sociological study to understand all the factors. But we do know that till the 1970s things were quite different. The hatred against minority groups certainly did not exist on the scale that we see now. In fact many who attended missionary schools and others as well will testify to the fact it was not present at all. The change of course began in the 1980s, mostly as a result of the policies of the late General Ziaul Haq. His use of the media, of new hardline seminaries set up under his directions and his distortion of religion were all tools used for this purpose.

The fact that some of the most influential members of minority groups fled the country for obvious reasons weakened communities further. Others who chose to stay and fight on were stripped of military honours and other decorations simply because of their belief. New laws made the minorities a different caste within a country that gradually grew more and more fragmented.

We have all seen the results of this. The multiple incidents where Christian houses have been burnt down, blasphemy accusations brought or Hindu girls in Sindh abducted and forced to convert are examples. The question of course is how we can move back from this. Is there a route at all? Is it open to us? Can we opt to walk down it or have too many barriers been erected?

To do so successfully we need to reverse all that has happened over nearly four decades. New extremist groups have cropped up everywhere brandishing a curious version of faith and sometimes opening arguing that non-Muslims have no place in the country created in 1947. It is difficult today to eliminate such groups entirely but we can at least work towards preventing them from growing and becoming more powerful. The military has made it clear to the civilian leaderships that it sees militants as an enemy force; one that cannot be tolerated. This description also extends to outfits based in the Punjab and now also in Sindh. They will need to be acted against through one tactic or the other.

Mere force is not enough to achieve this. As we saw during the 10-hour long operation against unknown militants at a house in Raiwind some security action is no doubt necessary. But beyond this we need to alter thinking. This is a far harder task; how to achieve it is something to think about at great depth.

In the first place, at the school level children need to be re-taught all that has been stripped away about tolerance and acceptance for diversity. We also need to consider why we have become so obsessed with turning ourselves into a ‘pseudo Arab’ state of some kind, both in our use of common phraseology and other actions. Do we think the Arabs then will accept us as being one of them. Language and culture determine such matters. South Asian workers across the Gulf and the Middle East will testify to the treatment they receive.

We must then learn to re-claim our own heritage and our own culture. To take pride in the differences that exist within our nation and in its lack of uniformity. This means accepting all languages, all cultures and all religions as equals. Getting to this point will not be a simple task at all. The increased role of a hard-line media makes it still more difficult.

But this is something we need to achieve. It is the only way to unify our country, to get to know all its’ people a bit better and to accept that as citizens all of them have rights that cannot be denied on any ground. Lack of understanding of our own people makes this extremely hard to manage. We can only hope for success because without this there can be very little hope for the future.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor, Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com