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FROM JINNAH TO THE MURDER OF SALMAN TASEER
By Samuel Baid
Pakistan has got a new hero this new year. His name : Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. His heroic feat : killing of the man whose security was his paid duty. The man killed was Mr. Salman Taseer, the Governor of Pakistan’s most powerful province, Punjab. His fault: he was among rare politicians who would boldly express his enlightened views in a country of gathering darkness. He had no hesitation in criticizing the misuse of Blasphemy Laws for personal vengeance. In his opinion the death sentence to a middle-aged Christian woman labourer under the Blasphemy Laws was based on false allegations by those who had personal score to settle.
Qadri, on the other hand, belonged to the elite police force of Punjab. Accordingly to the recruitment rules, all candidates are thoroughly vetted to make sure they don’t have extreme religious or political views and alliances. But a faction of Taliban has claimed Qadri was its man in the elite force. This factions of Qazi Hussain, a Taliban commander (reportedly killed in a US drone attack in North Waziristan in October), claimed: “we claim responsibility for the killing of Salman Taseer. The Punjab Governor was our target and we have planned this programme and the man who killed him was from among us”. These are reports that Qadri was also a member of a Barelvi organization called “Dawat-i-Islam”. This shows that there is threatening infiltration of jehadis and Islamic militants in the police administration.
Mr. Salman Taseer and Qadri can be taken as two symbols of contradictions in the Pakistani society today. Ironically, both these contradictory symbols derive their inspiration from Mr. Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan. The former goes by the vision Mr. Jinnah propounded in the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947. The likes of Mr. Taseer believe that unless Pakistan works towards realizing that vision with a missionary zeal, the Islamists will turn the country into a mad house. Here Mr. Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan was of a country where religion did not play any role in the affaris of the state and where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs lived as equal citizens. He did not use the word secularism but this is what his vision of Pakistan on August 11 was all about. That was real Jinnah.
But between March 1940 and August 1947, the enlightened Mr. Jinnah wore a mask of a mullah bigot in pursuit of Pakistan. On March 23, 1940, he chose Lahore to float the two-nation theory, which described Hindus and Muslims as two separate nations who had nothing in common between them. During the ten years preceding the creation of Pakistan be traveled the length and breadth of North India to mobilize Muslim support for his campaign. In the beginning he didn’t want mullahs’ support, but soon he ralised that their fiery, frenzied speeches were needed for mobilizing Muslim masses. Mullahs promised the masses that Pakistan would be an Islamic State. Mr. Jinnah reinforced this promise by frequently giving hate massages against Hindus and asking Muslims to give up anti-Islamic and evil Hindu customs and return to the Quran and the Hadis. This is exactly what Taliban and fundamentalists are demanding in Pakistan without referring to Mr. Jinnah. Mr. Taseer’s killer justified his act by saying Pakistan was created in the name of Islam. On January 9, Islamist parties chose Mr. Jinnah’s mazar in Karachi to hold a massive rally to warn the government against any plans to amend the Blasphemy Laws. The rally told the government to take back Sherry Rahman’s bill for the amendment of these laws. The rally attended by banned terrorist groups like Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and Lashkari-i-Jhangvi, apparently sought to give an impression that they were for the realization of Mr. Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan.
Mr. Jinnah was not a Hindu hater. In fact, in India he is remembered as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim amity. Yet he preached hatred of Hindus. He was opposite of a practicing Muslim. Yet he asked Muslim masses to return to holy Quran and Hadis. This cannot be dismissed just as a case of brazen hypocrisy: it was a prescription for the end of Pakistan before it was created.
Mr. Jinnah had differences with the top leadership of the Indian National Congress, but he had no problem with this party and its ideology, he was once a distinguished leader of it. Nor had he any cause for preaching hatred of Hindus. Hindus, including Mahatama Gandhi, held him in high esteem then and they do it still as is very clear from Indian leaders L.K.Advani and Jaswant Singh’s positive assessment of him. Mr. Jinnah was apparently trying to back up mullah bigots who could not campaign for a separate homeland for Muslims without Hindu bashing.
Mr. Jinnah’s August 11 address to the Constituent Assembly and his expressed desire to settle down in Mumbai in his own house after partition gave an impression that he was for India-Pakistan close friendship. It was not so. After partition, Mahatama Gandhi wanted to visit Pakistan. Mr. Jinnah refused permission. When his government leaders told him Gandhi’s visit would be good for India-Pakistan relations, he snapped: throw me into the sea before you call him to Pakistan. Mr. Jinnah also approved the invasion of Jammu and Kashmir in October 1947. That led to the first war between India and Pakistan.
Mr. Jinnah didn’t live long enough to see what damage he had done to his own creation – Pakistan. It is no exaggeration that the hatred of India / Hindus is one single factor responsible for political, social and economic instability and rise of religious bigotry and terrorism in Pakistan. Mr. Jinnah unwittingly invested the Army with the title of the defender of the ideological borders of Pakistan by sending it to invade Kashmir at a time when the country’s political leadership had not yet taken shape. Since then, the Army has maintained its superiority in the country by encouraging fundamentalism, and since the Afghan war of the 1980s, it has encouraged jehadism and terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy. This policy has made Pakistan the breeding ground of domestic and global terrorism in the name of Islam.
Pakistan has become a country where there is no punishment for crimes committed with the state backing or in the name of religion. Those who commit such crimes are heroes. In January 1971, the hijackers of an Indian Airlines plane from Srinagar to Lahore were treated as heroes. So were the subsequent hijackers in the 1980s and in December 1999. Hafiz Saeed, who masterminded the massacre in Mumbai in November 2008 is a hero in Punjab. Dr. Aafia Sidiqui, who is in jail in the United States for terrorism and links to Al-Qaeda is also a hero in Pakistan. The actual killers of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, his wife protested till her death, were never brought to book. And there are many other instances. In the light of these, one has to wait to see if Qadri is punished at all.
The reaction to Mr. Salman Taseer’s murder showed some dangerous trends in Pakistan.
1 Educated young people in Pakistan and Britain gleefully greeted this murder. Hundreds of lawyers, who, although fought for the re-instatement of dismissed judges and independent jury during 2008-09, hailed Qadri as a hero, garlanded him and volunteered to defend him. The Supreme Court, which at once takes note of the PPP government’s steps which are criticized by the opposition, chose to ignore the announcement of a Rs. 2 crore award to anyone who would kill Mr. Taseer.
2 Political leadership showed no spine to stand up to fundamentalists. Notice how the Nawaz Muslim League kept away from the funeral of Mr. Taseer because of the fear of jehadis although Mr. Taseer was the Governor of Punjab, ruled by this party. The Nawaz League is known for its links with jehadis.
3 Not surprisingly, the media, especially Urdu newspapers and TV channel played up the statements and threats of those who hailed Mr. Taseer’s assassination and suppressed opposite sane views. Senior journalists of “Express” told BBC (Urdu) that Pakistan’s was qatil (murderer) media. He said the media was carrying prominently all threats to the life of Mr. Taseer.
The presumption that the new educated generation in Pakistan was fed up with assertive religious obscurantism, starkly proved to be wishful in the aftermath of Mr. Taseer’s assassination. Darkness is fast devouring all Pakistan’s institutions – education, politics, defence, police, judiciary and media. That makes the western fears about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear assets very real.
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“Come forward as servants of Islam organize the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody.” these were the words of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, at the initiation of Pakistan. But we all can see how it has degraded and how a women is considered nothing more than a commodity and a few who oppose it are punished for being morally correct.
India being a neighbor to Pakistan as well as being enemy states should take up these matters seriously with Pakistan as at present situation India is facing the most dangerous threat from Pakistan.