With eyes wide shut

We have become accustomed to looking at the world around us with our eyes shut – believing only what we want to want to, choosing the images we want to imagine.

For short periods we do open our eyes, as we did following the twin bombings in Quetta early this year, targeting and killing over 100 Hazaras. But largely, as is always the case, only a few have the courage to keep their eyes open and keep looking and doing the necessary.

Yes, a fundraising campaign for the affected families has been launched. Yes, some people have continued efforts to highlight their plight. But for the most part even those present at the countrywide vigils have stopped looking, or at least stopped looking quite so intently.

The truth is that the dismissal of the Balochistan government changes nothing at all. There has been no visible improvement in the law-and-order situation there, and the Hazaras continue to live in fear.

In Quetta, Hazara men in particular have disappeared into the relative safety of Alamdar Road – which runs through their own area. They have vanished largely from universities and colleges, though Hazara girls continue to attend classes. Meetings between Hazara and non-Hazara friends are becoming increasingly impossible: the Hazaras are too afraid to venture outside their territory, and too scared to let outsiders in – lest they be spies for potential bombers.

An entire community of some 600,000 people has barricaded itself away from a society unable – or unwilling – to protect them. We can only wonder who will be next. Which group will be targeted on an ethnic or religious basis and what will happen as one community after another is decimated? In such circumstances, the failure to speak up could be disastrous.

This is not the only situation in which there has been a glaring failure to agitate. Yes, people have spoken up in the Shahzeb Khan murder case, but not in others that involve feudal outrages so horrendous they are hard to digest.

Some days ago, in the deeply feudal southern Punjab, a landlord set fire to his field after spotting two small girls taking sugarcane from it. Five-year-old Alina suffered critical burns and died, while her cousin, Sana – about the same age – has been seriously injured. The ‘punishment’ for stealing those few pieces of sugarcane was obviously extreme. Not unexpectedly, the police has failed to lodge a case against the landlord, but instead registered one only against his servant.

It is obvious that in this country ordinary citizens find it very difficult to get justice. Similar incidents have occurred before, with landlords who control small, medieval-style fiefdoms setting their dogs on ‘trespassers’, raping women and generally getting away scot-free with all this. Such realities of life shape our society, turning it into the kind of place it has become.

The kind of thinking that now floats within its boundaries is disturbing. At a meeting, the ‘shura’ or central decision-making body of the Jamaat-e-Islami held that both the late Salmaan Taseer and Mumtaz Qadri, his assassin, were guilty of crime.

Since then there has been discussion on ‘public interest’ murder and implications that Qadri’s act fit into this category. The suggestion is obviously absurd. It opens doors to anarchy, veering away from existing laws and leaving the matter of ‘public interest’ open to all kinds of interpretations.

The fact also is that Taseer had – by speaking out against blasphemy laws – not committed any crime. Even if some believed he had, it should have been determined in a court of law and not by a bullet pumped through his body.

The ambiguity about the Taliban, confusion about how to handle them and the manner in which this is tied in to the US role in the region adds to the problem. So does the Talibanisation of minds that has taken place creating its own social complications.

It is now almost frightening to look at pictures from the 1960s and 1970s, which depict a different time, a different place, and a different mindset. Largely as a result of the systematic ‘Islamisation’ drive initiated by the late General Ziaul Haq, cities like Quetta, Karachi and Lahore have changed virtually beyond recognition. Fear walks through them, and life has been stifled.

Despite a gradual lifting of the harsh regulations of Zia through the late 1990s and beyond, that process is far from complete. The rapid spread of extremist Islam through the Muslim world – largely as a result of US policies – has added to the problem.

A solution could lie in looking towards India, and ending the process of deeming it an enemy. But this is more complicated than it seems. Incidents that jump out at us seem to be designed to prevent just this.

The recent events on the Line of Control (LoC), just as Pak-India relations were reaching greater normalcy, are perhaps the latest example. The brutal beheadings bear the trademark of the Taliban, and their mode of action. Yes, the Indian response has not been mature either, but looking at things from our own side of the fence, the timing of key events has been extraordinary.

The 2008 Mumbai siege came just as President Zardari had suggested Pakistan’s willingness for a ‘no-first-strike’ agreement on nuclear weapons. Such an agreement is of course now a thing of the future.

There have been other events before this that also raise suspicions. The inane action in Kargil began in May 1999, soon after then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s visit to Pakistan and signs of rapidly melting ice.

The hijacking of an Indian aircraft in December, 1999 and the subsequent release of key militants seemed also to be part of a larger plan. We need to be mature and wise enough to realise this, and make others aware as well. The truth is that without peace with India, we cannot move forward at all. As it is, we have moved many, many steps back.

As citizens, more and more of us need to think about the future of our country. At the moment, too few do; and too few are willing to speak out, placing us all in even greater danger as events continue to unfold around us.

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