Hasan the potter did not realise he had company. As he stood beseeching, in that famous poem by Noon Meem Rashid, at the door of his beloved Jahanzad to have the pleasure of her company back in his life, a whole lot of people stood by him. An entire country, indeed.

For what Hasan said was also in the hearts of the infinitely large crowd accompanying him. The love of his life also made their hearts beat. They thought he was speaking on their behalf.

They had seen something in Jahanzad’s dazzling eyes that had mesmerised them — just as those Caucasian eyes had dazzled and mesmerised Hasan. A mere look from those eyes had them all leave their daily chores and look for her street after street, town after town, city after city, country after country — just as those eyes made Hasan abandon his potter’s wheel. They forgot about their families after having experienced her love – just as Hasan did – because they were so besotted by Jahanzad.

And when he saw her again, albeit briefly, after nine long years, her dazzling eyes pierced straight into his heart as they always had. Just as they struck the hearts of millions of people around him.

They stood by Hasan’s side, apprehensive that from then onwards they may only receive Jahanzad’s occassional, fleeting glimpses.

They also complained, as Hasan did, that they could not focus on their work unless Jahanzad sat beside them. Their families, like Hasan’s, shook them by the shoulders, trying vainly to remind them of the need to put food on the table. But they had lost the desire to work — just like Hasan had.

Deprived of the creative company of Jahanzad, they had lost interest in whatever they were good at. Their hearts hankered after her. She was their inspiration for getting things done with a verve, a flair – like she was for Hasan.

Their inspiration had been taken away from them. It had been hidden and stored away under lock and key. They knew she was there somewhere but did not have access to her.

So, just like Hasan, they became a handful of dust, like potter’s clay when it runs dry. Jahanzad gave meaning to their existence; she was the reason they wanted to live for. Just like she was all these things for Hasan.

Without Jahanzad, they breathed but did not live. They existed but had no presence. Without inspiration from her, their work was as good as useless. Just as how being away from her ruined everything for Hasan.

And like Hasan, they wanted her back.

Who had taken her away?

What could bring her back?

The one who is afraid of verve and flair in their work took her away. Without slaying that monster, they could not have her back.

                                  ***

Censorship is bad. Self-censorship is worse. The former is like a death warrant; the latter is like a new death every day. The former hurts the public; the latter harms the newspersons.

Freedom of expression and the right to offend the powerful are constitutional guarantees journalists in this country have struggled hard for. It is their Jahanzad. They have hankered after her for nine metaphorical years. They have protested in the streets. They have gone to jail. They have lost their jobs. But they have never stopped pursuing her.

Now that their Jahanzad is again being taken away – by instilling the fear of their own spoken and written words in their hearts – they cannot but speak out. They have to.

She represents the essence of their profession. Without this essence, their work will be insipid, just like the drying clay stored away in cold stone boxes so that the potter does not fashion it into vessels that please the eye and warm the heart.

They cannot go to work with passion until they get back what has been taken away from them and what gives their life’s work the verve and the flair that it must have. This is what Hasan is seeking in this poem — a creative freedom. This is what the journalists are asking for in this country — the freedom to speak out.

And just like Hasan the potter, they have seen what it means to spend a night in the company of Jahanzad on a boat moving imperceptibly on the waves of the Tigris river — what joy, what freedom, what ecstasy! They cannot go back to their potter’s wheels now, not without that joy, that freedom, that ecstasy.

This was originally published in the Herald's June 2018 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

Before a Muslim registry, there has been an Ahmadi registry — every Ahmadi living in Pakistan has to declare that they are Ahmadis. Indeed, it is a bit more drastic than that: every Pakistani Muslim citizen has to declare that he or she is not an Ahmadi. Does that qualify as a Muslim registry?

It is not yet clear if Donald Trump’s Muslim registry will deprive the Muslims living in America of their constitutional rights, such as the right to freedom of speech and the right to practice their faith. The Ahmadi registry, however, clearly states that there are certain things the Ahmadis cannot even say.

They cannot have places of worship that look like Muslim places of worship, with minarets and domes — even though Muslim places of worship did not always have minarets and domes; they still do not in many parts of the world.

If all this is correct, we do not have the right to question or criticise a Muslim registry being planned in America. Trump is only following where we have already led.

If the Ahmadi registry being a precursor to a Muslim one is not enough proof of that, look at how we have been trying to shut out refugees from Afghanistan over the last many years: repatriating those who have spent all their lives here, married here (sometimes with Pakistanis), did business and held jobs here. Many of them have families both in Pakistan and Afghanistan; others find our healthcare and education systems better than those in their homeland and want to stay here to have (relatively) better lives.

Refugees in the United States – and those aspiring to go there – also want these very things. And that is why the Americans want to keep them out, by making the same arguments we make. That letting them in and allowing them stay costs a lot of resources we cannot have for ourselves.

Or consider ‘fake news’. We have been at it for decades. Just recently, our official news agency released a report about a BBC probe being conducted over a news item that contained information on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s children’s properties in London. The release turned out to be fake. Did we even ask who released it? Did we hold anyone responsible for concocting its contents and releasing them to the press?

In an ironic twist, rather than us becoming like Americans (as is the dream of almost every upper middle class and upper class Pakistani), it is the Americans who are becoming and looking a lot like us: prejudiced, xenophobic, vulnerable.

And as the American dream turns sour, it appears more and more like our national and official ideology. An ideology that declares Pakistan to be a fortress of religion, created to keep the religion pure and preserved; to keep enemies away; to ensure that its denizens are not corrupted by foreign influence. When Trump orders a wall to keep the Mexicans away, he is also building a fortress America: to keep the country pure and preserved from the depredations of the marauders from the South. When he signs executive orders to ban visas for the residents of certain countries, another invisible part of his fortress is cemented. When he calls Australia’s prime minister, reprimanding him for sending ‘bombers’ to America, another portion rises on the horizon.

From their own horrid experience, Pakistanis know what life in a fortress is like: stultifying, inert and, most importantly, lacking in harmony, peace and camaraderie. That is why every one of us wants to leave the fortress at the first opportunity. And that is why we have such a thing as an exit control list — so that we can keep our own people in, so that they cannot run away. Now that Trump’s ‘project fortress’ is well under way and now that the Americans have embarked on the same route to the that we have been treading on for a long time, they might as well have their own exit control list soon.

A look beyond Trump’s America does not inspire any confidence. Either the whole world seems to be in the grip of a frenzy, where the old order has fallen apart, or a new one is emerging with ominous signs: of mutual suspicion, even hatred; of insularity, even mutual repulsion. Many countries are now going through what we have been experiencing for decades: religious wars, intolerance of others, anxieties about our own existence.

Should we feel more comfortable in this strange new world because we are already so tuned to its ugliest aspects? Or should we keep yearning for a braver, more beautiful and more harmonious world — both here and elsewhere? The choice has not been starker in decades.

This article was originally published in the Herald's February 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Silence comes in many forms. It could be a deliberate act of not talking. It could be an involuntary restraint on speech, an enforced ban. It could simply be the absence of voices. Or it could be the drowning of one voice – or some voices – by many. You may be talking, but is anyone listening? Or, more aptly, is your voice reaching anyone at all?

The first form of silence is a mystic act: of deciding not to say what cannot be – or should not be – said. The second results from the actions of the state’s coercive apparatus. The third is a natural state of quiet. And the fourth is just white noise — a lot of it.

This last form – this white noise – is causing a deafening silence: that talks and does not listen, that shouts and does not stop, that hurts and does not apologise. When noise becomes an incomprehensible babble, it drowns the senses. It creates an auditory vacuum that registers no sound, no matter how loud. White noise is, thus, received, and perceived, as nothing but silence — it is like watching television on mute.

White noise, as is obvious, is noise by the electronic news media and the silence it drowns is the one a human mind requires to wonder, to think, to understand: the silence that news in print has afforded its audience for generations.

Minds dulled by television see the printed word as hieroglyphics from a forgotten age. A large number of people have stopped looking at print publications. Many others are doing it with decreasing frequency and dwindling regularity. If and when news audiences duck the auditory and visual onslaught of a television, they are grabbed by their thumbs by social media. When news viewers are not sitting in front of the idiot box, they are highly likely to be transfixed by their mobile phones, laptops and desktops in the same order of preference. The readers of news in print, therefore, are disappearing — here as well as everywhere else.

What shall print publications do to survive? The short answer: do what the book industry is doing the world over; add value by improving the quality of both the content and the packaging. While people read books online as much as they read news publications online, there is still a cultural and intellectual premium attached to carrying the print copy of a well-written and well-printed book. News in print must also consider becoming that — a prized possession, a collector’s item.

For a long answer, consider the commercial pressures on news in print. Advertisers who help newspapers and news magazines reach their readers at a fraction of their production cost are deserting print publications in droves, even when inputs – such as electricity, newsprint and human resources – are becoming increasingly pricier. As readership numbers are getting smaller, so are advertisers’ budgets for newspapers and news magazines. The print media’s business model that worked for decades seems to have reached its expiry date.

Yet, the need – if not the demand – for verified and verifiable news content that only print publications can create has never been greater. Electronic media’s predilection for the popular and the commercial, and the social media’s propensity to exaggerate and distort – if not entirely manufacture – reality, make it imperative that there be an antidote to their excesses. Print media alone has the time and the capacity to sift fact from fiction, distinguish information from propaganda and separate news from noise.

To continue attracting enough readers who can be sold to enough advertisers who then provide enough financial resources to keep newspapers and news magazines afloat, many (if not all) Pakistani publishers are pushing their publications in a different direction. Most Sunday magazines in English have been left with next to no content. The Sunday magazines of Urdu newspapers have always been a curious mix of politics, culture, fashion, showbiz, travel, fiction and spirituality – a bit of everything for everyone in a weekend readership – with the difference that editorials and advertorials have gotten inseparably mixed up in many of their pages in recent years.

But this whittling down of content is not bringing back readers. Bringing newspapers and magazines online has also not solved the problem. While advertising revenues are scratchy, competition is so intense and readership so fickle that even the fittest struggle to survive in cyberspace.

Print publications are faced with two more monsters: their cover price (a matter which, in Pakistan, is largely in the hands of newspaper hawkers) and chaperoning by the state’s security apparatus. Cover price has become nearly obsolete in the age of free online content, and pressures from the state in Pakistan have only intensified. Not that the state has not tried to block the production and distribution of the electronic and social media’s content. Yet, pulling the plug on newspapers and news magazines is much easier. They have a single mode for distribution: choke that and you can choke them out of life.

Caught between squeezing revenues and even more rapidly squeezing editorial freedom, print publications are being silenced into becoming something they actually are a cure to: a white noise that drowns the silence and a social media that looks busy in doing nothing, at least nothing meaningful.

This article was originally published in the Herald's December 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Death is cheap in the country of chaos. People are dying everywhere and in all sorts of situations — and most of the time, we do not even stop to ask what happened. But no death happens in a vacuum — there is always some context to it, some reason to it, some effect of it.

As many as four Hazara women assassinated in Quetta, scores of police cadets and an army officer killed in a training school (also near Quetta) and four mourners killed in a Shia gathering in Karachi — all these deaths resulted from well-targeted and well-planned attacks. And all within the last month. We have also lost soldiers and officers near the border with Afghanistan and (mostly) civilian lives on the border with India.

And we are not stopping to ask what happened.

Indeed, we are ignoring (in the least worst scenarios) and exacerbating (in the worst scenarios) the context, the reasons and the effects of all this mayhem around us. What ignoring does is not desirable; what exacerbating does is not acceptable.

Of ignoring — we have perfected it into an art form. When death happens in remote corners of the country, it is as good as not having happened at all. Jiwani and Khuzdar, Mohmand and Tirah, Khanpur and Ancholi — none of these places sound familiar to most of us. Many of us may not even be able to spot them on a map. Something happening there is just a brief blip on our news radar; it disappears even before its precise location is known. The news about death at these places is drowned by catchy songs selling everything from drinks to dreams, superimposed with cuss words spoken by the members of warring political factions, passed off to unsuspecting audiences as important proclamations, responses and counter-responses thereof. Morning shows, game shows, talk shows — nothing stops to ponder over, let alone mourn, the death in a far-off place we do not even know exists.

Of exacerbating — we have perfected it into a science. Where a political party cannot hold a public gathering in the capital because a section in the law prohibits that, a religious group can — even when it consists of people openly hostile to Pakistan’s sectarian and religious diversity. When people are taken away from their homes, from their vehicles, from their workplaces under charges that they are opposed to the state, self-declared jihadis are left free to mobilise support — even when no one under the constitution has the power or the right to declare a jihad in or outside the country. In the first case, they would be breaching the law of the land; in the second, the law of the world.

Is it, then, difficult to understand why suicide blasts continue ripping us apart from within at the same time when cross-border tensions with India and Afghanistan keep us worried about our place in the region and the world at large?

And when we look at the wreckage left by the murderous destruction wreaked by terrorism, we often find the existing or former activists of these very groups being responsible for it. Everyone who is anyone in Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami, has at one stage been associated with Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and, by extension, with its latest reincarnation, Ahl-e-Sunnat Wal Jamaat, which was the main participant in the gathering at the capital. Many, if not all, in senior leadership positions among the Pakistani Taliban have, at some stage in their violent careers, been members of one group or the other of jihadis trained, sent and – perhaps even now – supported by us to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir. That is what the science of exacerbation does: it creates a nuclear chain reaction of violence that not even its initiators can switch off.

With a combination of ignoring and exacerbating, we have achieved a royal mess, both in the periphery and at the centre. The former is falling apart because the centre cannot (or does not want to) hold; the latter is in distress because too much activity and power and, consequently, conflict are concentrated in it.

The centre has too much power to handle, too many players to handle that power and too few steady hands at the helm. The continued rift between the civilian and military leaderships is only aggravated by political aspirants, intrusive news media and a judiciary ready to oblige or spurn, depending on who is asking for a favour. And not a single sane voice is heard from within the power corridors — of statesmanship, of vision, of wisdom. Pettiness rules and seeks pettiness: personal and short-term victories, personal and short-term goals, personal and short-term gains. All fought for in a language that may embarrass even the actors in a Lahori stage show.

The distressed centre is being pulled down by the weight of its own power, its own power players and their disruptive power games. And we are not stopping to ask what happened.

The disinterested centre cannot care less about the periphery coming off bit by bit by the causes and effects of the perennial lack of attention it has been subjected to since long. And we are not stopping to ask what happened.

Death is becoming cheaper by the day in the country of chaos.

This article was originally published in the Herald's November 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Shakeel Ahmed, the lieutenant colonel, can be seen in a Twitter photo wearing a black waistcoat and a white shalwar kameez, smiling warmly to people lined up at a reception. In another photo, he is looking thoughtfully into the camera as his two daughters peer over his shoulders. Yasir Sultan, the major, gets mentioned in a Facebook post that carries two photos of a damaged sports car. The caption reads “Major Yasir Sultan’s car at the spot of [the] accident”. In another Facebook photo, a bespectacled Sultan is holding his little daughter as both pose for the camera.

The photos raise some disconcerting questions. Why would two officers travel on an official assignment in a shiny two-seater sports vehicle? Why were they on the road late in the evening in an area considered unsafe and, that too, for a journey that still required them to travel at least 200 kilometres more? If they died in the line of duty, why did the newspaper attribute its report to “official sources”? Why did it not cite an official press release from the Frontier Corps (FC) for which the two officers were working, or the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) that usually briefs the media on military-related incidents and developments?

“Official sources” became active again on April 21, 2016, when print and television media started buzzing with reports of 12 army officers getting sacked for corruption. These officials reportedly included a lieutenant general, a major general and several brigadiers and colonels. But, in only a day, the number of brigadiers and colonels was reduced to four — by “official” sources. There was no official statement from the army’s General Headquarters; no press release from the ISPR — not even so much as a tweet, which has become the chosen mode of communication for the ISPR chief.

Next: the speculation. The sacked officers were involved in helping smugglers. Lieutenant General Obaidullah Khattak, who worked as the Quetta Corps Commander after working as the Inspector General of the FC, is said to have made money by letting smuggling happen under his watch. His successor as the FC Inspector General, Major General Ejaz Shahid, is alleged to have had a sports car smuggled for his son. The two officers who died in the accident near Kuchlak in November 2014 were reportedly test driving the same car for their boss’ son.

Then: the adulation. What a fair-minded, honest Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif is! He didn’t pause for a moment before sacking such senior army officials after he found them to be involved in corruption. He is the righteous commander-in-chief who can go to any lengths to rid the army of the few bad eggs muddying the image of Pak Fauj.

There was no serious conversation about the registration of a case against Shahid and his colleagues for smuggling a car without paying taxes and import duties. No mention of the source of money with which the son of a two-star general could afford to buy a high-end racing vehicle. And, most worryingly, not even a hint of an inquiry into how and why the two dead officers were driving the car they were riding. Is a mere sacking sufficient punishment for this extremely shocking tragedy? No one even ventures a comment.

Without wanting to turn all this into the usual military-versus-civilian argument, let us admit that the pots and the kettles are all black here. Islands of purity cannot survive for long if the entire sea around them is polluted and poisoned and, as the details above as well as the National Logistic Cell corruption case have shown, the army is not that kind of an island.

Crime and punishment cannot be made proportionate without transparency which, in turn, is a function of something called honesty and integrity — conspicuous by their absence amidst us. If we still think that a few good men can put us right, we can deceive ourselves with the #ThankYouRaheelSharif but if we are serious about ridding ourselves of the disease that has eaten into our souls, we need something bigger, better and broader. A commission for truth and justice that forces everybody to stand down from their perches to become accountable and answerable for all their acts of omission and commission? Worth a shot. The other option is a collective race down the moral abyss that is staring us in the face — the uniformed and the civilian alike.

This was originally published in the Herald's April 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

After the concluding speeches were made, final slogans were raised and last prayers were offered, there was still something left to do. And a contingent of several thousand people set out – hands flailing in anger, voices raised in protest and feet stamping in earnest – to do just that. The security cordons parted; the barricades evaporated; the police vanished — as if some invisible force was at work to help. Driven by a zeal only the most devout have, encouraged by a lack of resistance only those on a divine mission expect and spurred by a rage only the wronged can muster, a crowd arrived at Islamabad’s largest and most significant public space.

It smashed bus stations, put vehicles on fire and disrupted whatever life it could find around the square that links the state of Pakistan with the society of Pakistan. For the better part of a week, that link was broken — with the state having retreated into the deepest recesses of its heavily-guarded and intensively-fortified bunkers and the society having moved along as merrily, or morosely, as ever. The mob, a few hundred strong, knew it had no agenda to pursue, no plans to follow and no leaders to obey. It only vaguely believed that it could not have been there without a reason. The reason? Dissent. Defiance. Disruption.

Dissenters, by their definition, do not belong to the majority. Defiance cannot occur against a state that has no backbone left — or at least is unwilling to show one. It was sheer mindless disruption. And yet, it had a purpose — a worldly purpose. The mob wanted to talk to the people watching the idiot box in the comfort of their homes. It hankered after a version of itself augmented by creative camera techniques. It desired for a voice amplified by mics capable of turning a whisper into a windstorm.

It needed coverage. The coverage that was denied to it by a state that never fails to give the impression that it is not in charge, that it is doing someone else’s bidding, that it is a puppet whose masters keep changing — from moolah to military to moulvi and back again. And as it changes masters, so it goes about doing its business: loving and hating, accepting and rejecting, colliding and colluding with different sections of the society at different times and in different spaces, depending on who pulls its strings.

Those in the state apparatus who thought they would muddle along through the bluff, bluster and blackout of the news. They were so blinded by the brilliance of their ideas that they could not even see what was coming their way until it came and sat on their chest like the heavy burden of failure. Their liberal backers – living in the tiny space covered by the op-ed pages of the English language newspapers, operating in a reality that calls itself ‘virtual’ for a reason and thriving on the unhealthy diet of micoblogging – were deafened by the sound of their self-congratulatory voices until they were drowned in the noise from Islamabad’s high-security zone. Their foreign minders – guided by political righteousness, driven by ideological correctness and spurred by cultural authoritarianism – were deluded by the obedience of the minions, except that the disobedient soon outshouted the obedient.

If only those mourning for Mumtaz Qadri were given as much media coverage as every semi-literate mullah is getting, we would not be mourning the death of the state now. The rules start losing relevance when too many exceptions are made in their implementation. When, however, exceptions become the rule, then thinking of implementing the rules is not only impossible, it also become counterproductive as we have seen in the case of 1,500 clueless mobsters blocking the heart of the capital, as long as they did not tire of their own tiny spectacle. They saw the media blockade of their activities as a sectarian move, selectively slapped by a state that has allowed every halfwit to rave and rant on the telly for hours and days on end. And if anyone thought that not allowing the media coverage of Qadri’s funeral has taken the edge off the blasphemy issue, they must share their thoughts with anyone on the street — and expect their illusions to shatter instantly.

By grimacing at the cameras, shouting at mics and talking to the people watching, the crowd would have dispersed after the funeral at Liaquat Bagh. They were, instead, made to snatch the proverbial limelight — smashing television vans, kicking journalists and forcibly diverting the attention of the television audiences from a massive tragedy that was unfolding right then at Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan is sounding victorious with the benefit of hindsight, patting himself on the back that he did not negotiate, did not compromise and did not give into any demands by the mob. He does not realise they had nothing to negotiate for, nothing to give and take and nothing to demand for. That a 1,500-strong mob can manage to get as much attention as it likes for well over three days is what they were looking for, and that is exactly what it got.

And after having done all that, they did something else: they showed the space that once connected the state with the society has become a vast no man’s land — available to anyone with the will, the verve and the capacity to create violence to grab, hold and destroy.

This was originally published in the Herald's April 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Waris Shah’s epic on Heer’s life and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary on Saba Qaiser’s plight are about two protagonists who have many things in common, a river just being one of those. Both come from Punjab. Both made life choices that their fathers did not approve of. Both received punishment for their defiance — one was shot at and thrown in the water to die, the other was coerced into marrying someone against her will.

Punjab, as seen through the literary imagination of Shah in his narration of Heer’s travails, appears little different from what the province looks like from whatever little is known about Qaiser’s story in Chinoy’s Oscar-winning documentary (one only wishes that Chinoy, like Shah, had addressed a local audience in a local language). Patriarchy, violence against women, the link between a family’s honour and the love lives of its women – or lack thereof – are all common themes between them. That may suggest that nothing has changed in this part of the world, over the centuries, as far as the treatment of women is concerned.

Well, the law on violence against women has changed recently. And Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised that another one – on honour killing – will also change soon. Most women’s rights activists are ecstatic (as are Pakistan’s donors in the West); the religious right is aghast (as are the custodians of desi culture). Everyone in between is puzzled about the intrusive nature of a law that gives state officials access to the bedroom of a married couple and the near impossibility of its implementation within a society steeped in the culture of compromise and cover-up.

Also read: The sole voice: Women's rights activist, Nighat Said Khan

The overlapping of religious edicts and common law adds another layer to the confusion. After the state criminalised honour killings in a previous bout of pro-women legislation in 2004, the killers started using the Islamic provisions of diyat in their favour — paying their way out of trial and punishment.

A lot seems to have changed, but Punjab still continues to look the same. Why? One of the basic reasons is that those who draft the laws do not know the ground realities (doing it mostly in accordance with what the donors ask for) and those who oppose them are unwilling to tackle social and moral problems, except through religious orthodoxy.

Promulgating laws for regulating the collective life of a community is the primary responsibility – as well as the essential mandate – of a state. So, yes, there is nothing wrong with enacting laws, especially ones made to support the marginalised sections of society such as women, children and minorities. But then the state should have the will – and the capacity – to implement those laws.

We have a law against dowry? Do we even know that it exists? The same overzealous officials who ensure that wedding functions come to an end before a certain hour in Lahore have never bothered to find out how much money is being spent on dowry in the same weddings. The same government that has put a ban on serving more than a single dish at wedding receptions never takes the trouble to find out how much money is being spent on the jewellery a bride gets from her parents. We also have a law against child labour and one on minimum wage. How many times does the state swing into action against those who employ children or who pay less than minimum wage to their workers?

Also read: Kishwar Naheed — the phenomenal woman

Religion, too, is a universally accepted part of life in our society. So, yes, there is nothing wrong if people (both as individuals and groups), want to live honest, pious and charitable lives, especially if it means ensuring that they do not unjustly profit from other people’s miseries and do not voluntarily cause harm to the weak and the infirm. But, then, the custodians of religion should have the courage to be innovative (as many of their predecessors have been in the past) when a religious point of view becomes incongruent with social, economic and judicial realities. So many traditions that religion once allowed are no longer practicable; slavery being the most obvious example. The mullah who agreed to authenticating Heer’s marriage against her will and the mufti raving and ranting against a documentary on a case of attempted honour killing both appear to be utterly incapable of that innovation. And that intransigence of the religious establishment is another common theme in women’s stories from yore; and also those of the present.

Sharif’s promised law on honour killing will face the same approval (from the women’s rights activists and the West) and disapproval (from the mullahs and the leaders of religious parties) and the twain shall never meet. The two sides need to take into account the reality of life as it is lived in the cities, towns and villages — rather than as it is presented in documentaries made in a foreign language and sermons given in another foreign language. Without that, the treatment of women in Punjab, and by extension in Pakistan, will see little, if any, improvement.

This was originally published in the Herald's March 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

He lives in a country of his own that no one can enter without his permission. There may be cases registered against him outside the boundary of his country but he cannot care less about them. He will not surrender to the police and the courts whose jurisdiction stops where his own jurisdiction starts. He can challenge the government, he can defy the state by issuing statements supporting those who are bent upon destroying it, and he – along with his family – can lead pitched battles against the law enforcement agencies causing a civil war within the heart of the federal capital. Anyone trying to arrest or try him better be warned. The whole country burnt the last time someone attempted to do that. His supporters blew themselves up as human bombs, taking hundreds of lives with them; his students launched numerous deadly attacks on security forces wherever they could.

He goes by his own set of laws and under those laws there is nothing wrong with spreading sectarian hatred, with accusing parts of the state of conspiring against him, even subjecting the writ of the courts to his own whimsical choices disguised as wait for a divine signal. It does not matter that there is a law against hurting other people’s religious sentiments; against questioning the integrity of the state institutions; against willfully indulging in contempt of the courts. What could have Abdul Aziz done to possess such superhuman powers? His Lal Masjid is a fort – made impenetrable by his acolytes willing to serve as human shields – where messengers from the police and the courts can only enter to confer not confront.

Contrast this with the hapless parents of a boy who topped all the exams he took. Coming from a poor family living in a crumbling single room house in a nondescript village, he moved to a big city for studies owing to the scholarships he had won on the basis of his stellar academic record. And then he went missing within months after his name had appeared on a merit list of students chosen for receiving laptops under a government scheme.

Also read: Republic of fear

Initially, the police said he was killed in a shootout with the law enforcement agencies in July 2014. His house was searched and his parents were taken into custody. Then they retracted and said he was alive and in the custody of the military intelligence.

Nobody ever disclosed where he was arrested from and what for. Yet somehow, slightly less than 18 months later, an army spokesman released his name to the media. He was among nine people whose death warrants the army chief had signed at the turn of the year. A brief description under his name said he “was an active member of Al Qaeda” and “was involved in attacks on law-enforcement personnel which claimed casualties”. There was no other detail — who he had attacked and killed, or where and when he had committed these acts. He had pleaded guilty of committing those offences “before the Magistrate and the trial court” which had tried him on four charges and “awarded death sentence”. There was no mention of where and when he was produced before a magistrate (even though we can assume that the court that had tried and punished him was a special military tribunal). What could have Aksan Mehboob done to avoid that fate? His story has fascinated no prying journalists. His case has attracted no attention from human rights activists and lawyers.

The difference between Aziz’s might and Mehboob’s plight is not merely the difference between the situations of two individuals. It is the difference that defines how the state acts – or does not act – selectively. It is the difference that determines why the state can – or cannot – enforce its writ in a uniform and equitable manner in all parts of its jurisdiction, on all sections of its citizens.

Also read: Triangle of terrorism

Both Aziz and Mehboob enjoy – at least in theory – the same constitutional protections against the arbitrary use of power by the state. Both Aziz and Mehboob deserve – at least ideally – the same legal treatment considering that they have been facing the same kind of allegations: of being in cahoots with militant organisations, of attacking members of the security forces. How come, then, Aziz can walk around a sizeable patch of the capital as if he owns it and Mehboob cannot even have a public trial where he can defend himself?

The reason: they live in two different countries. One, where a powerful mullah can hold the entire state apparatus hostage to his ability to shed blood. The other, where laws such as the Protection of Pakistan Act and forums such as the military courts are increasingly smothering the unheard voices of the already voiceless. Unless that difference ends, no amount of security operations, quick convictions and hurried hangings can bring peace. A first step to end that difference could be to deny Aziz the protection of a country within a country that he now so publicly enjoys.

This was originally published in the Herald's February 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Years are easy to conceptualise. They have a beginning, they have an end. They allow us to look at time the same way — as if it started one day and will end some day. They let us take stock of our lives over a certain, infinitesimally small, portion of time. They help us assume that we can take a new start on a certain day of a certain month, making a neat break from whatever we have been before that day. They facilitate us to review the past and make resolutions about the future, without having to worry about whatever existed before the past and whatever there will be after the future. Living in a year – or in a century – is, thus, living in the here and now, with clearly laid out space limits.

And it is this sense of the limits of time that makes us feel whether we have achieved anything in a given number of days, weeks and months. And the moment we realise we have not, we just rush: a government goes into overdrive, opening road building projects, holding meetings on subjects as varied as law and order in Karachi and government change in Balochistan; diplomacy gets into high gear — a prime minister is seen receiving guests and being received as a guest more often than he is seen in the parliament; a chief of army staff is spotted both among troops in far-off battle zones and with foreign dignitaries both inside and outside the country; a ruling party appears to be pushing through legislation on issues ranging from the privatisation of the state-owned airline to the whitening of black money. This past month looked like everyone important in Pakistan was looking at the close of the year as a deadline before which some things have to be accomplished regardless of whether those accomplishments are worth anything.

Look a little beyond and nothing either seems to have changed — or if it has, it has only for the worse. The road projects being launched are leaving disgruntled sections of the society in their wake, impasse over a security operation in Karachi remains unresolved, the formation of the new cabinet in Balochistan seems to be a work in perpetual progress, relationships with other countries are as stagnant as these ever have been (with India and Afghanistan, the ties are in their usual roller-coaster mode, despite some high-level parleys in recent weeks), anti-terrorism efforts have been rocked by two massive strikes in Mardan and Parachinar, both in December 2015, and the new legislative measures are stuck amid partisan fault lines.

All this raises the usual question: has Pakistan moved ahead over the last year and, if yes, then, by how much? Even though there can be multiple ways to find an answer to this question, it is almost certain that all these ways will throw up only one answer: nobody comes, nobody goes, nothing happens, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett. A poet from our own part of the world, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, answered the same question from his characteristic philosophical vantage point: we shall continue stumbling from crisis to crisis (and this may not be the best of the translations of his more mysteriously expressive “Yeh mulk aise hi chalta rahe ga”).

This could well be the pessimist’s resort to the long run in which days, weeks, months and years pass, but time never does. And within that permanence of time can then be placed the permanent human predicament that bad things will continue to happen. 

This long-term bleak view, however, is something that the human mind cannot live with and that is why the human civilisation has divided time into much smaller portions that can fit into finite human calculations and can throw up finite accomplishments. It is within these smaller portions of time that we seek to make adjustments and changes that make us feel better about ourselves. And it is within these small portions of time that states and societies take steps that ensure that they are stable, prosperous and peaceful within a given period of time. Pakistan, both as a state and a society, needs to make the most of 2016 – a tiny drop in the limitless ocean of time – to ensure that we are stable, prosperous and peaceful in this new year and in the next year, and in the year after that. 

If we can take care of the smaller portion of time, that will be the most advisable way of ensuring that we find happiness – both as individuals and as a community – in small things that we can accomplish in measurable, finite moments on a measurable, finite calendar. That way, we will be able to cross the infinite river of time through yearly bridges, to go from its one bank to the other, to move on from something that we could not achieve to something else that we may. 

Living in the moment and making the most of it so that it does not leave behind the regret of not having utilised it well — that is what we ought to be doing. Seeking to live in the long term is certainly not what a young and crisis-riddled country like Pakistan should be seeking to do. 

To paraphrase Keynes, another great thinker from the past century, all of us will be dead in the long term.

Since we are a conscientious people, we strictly want to remain within our own domain and do not wish to interfere in the affairs of our neighbours. We indeed, have always abided by the international laws as far as our relations with other countries have been concerned. That is why we seek, nay deserve, the support of the international community to make other countries – India in particular – behave the same way towards us. Preferably through a resolution, mind you!

There have been a few minor inconveniences though, and we are trying to rectify those. For instance, we have been sending regular and irregular fighters in Indian-administered Kashmir since 1984 (and nobody except us knows about the presence of the regulars, even though we have given them awards for gallantry); we have also been providing sanctuary, training and money to generations of Afghans fighting against their own state. Lastly, we have acquired nuclear weapons breaching a few unimportant global regulations and some minor trade rules.

And, we have sufficient justifications and explanations to have done these. For one, Kashmiris have the right to be freed by us and we, therefore, will continue supporting this right of theirs by sending them regular support in the form of our homegrown freedom fighters; the Afghans cannot be allowed to live under tyranny of any type – communist, democratic, liberal – so we will continue supporting them too until they have a genuinely Islamic state that brooks no dissent and harbours no notions of progress and development. And those nukes — which we have proudly produced by forcing a large part of our population to eat grass! We have shared these with only a few friends and neighbours for a simple reason — they will shower them on India in case somehow our nukes don’t work or are taken out. What’s the harm in that kind of forward planning?

Lest anyone get any wrong notions that we don’t abide by international norms and laws, we wish to make it clear that each and every step in our national life has been a reaction to the shenanigans of our enemies. One of our former commanders-in-chief, General Musa, was once able to articulate really well the importance of these shenanigans in our actions: he eloquently explained that our tanks that had crossed into India in September 1965, could not reach Amritsar because of Indian treachery. What enemy – other than the extremely treacherous and highly deceptive one sitting next door to us – would breach canals and blow up bridges in the face of advancing tanks of an always honest and truthful neighbour?

But the past is the past and like men with large hearts, we are not going to keep harping about it. Especially after we have proved to the world beyond a shadow of doubt, that it is the Indian intelligence agency RAW, that is behind all the problems faced by us. It has purchased many of our intellectuals, journalists and politicians — especially those who we disparagingly call pacifist liberals. Who even needs them in an Islamic republic which seeks to protect the rights, and interests, of the Muslim communities and states everywhere in the world? And why on earth would anyone in their right frame of mind ever demand legitimacy for the people’s electoral mandate; respect for institutional boundaries; economic, cultural, political and religious rights for the underprivileged sections of the society; an across-the-board accountability, not just of the corrupt politicians and their lackeys but of those military rulers and their remnants, who have created and encouraged a culture of institutionalised corruption in the country? Don’t they know that our existence is under perpetual threat — from India, of course? Don’t they realise that we are in a perpetual state of war imposed on us by our eastern neighbour? Don’t they understand that we have been waging a permanent armed struggle for the security of our state? It is very clear that they don’t since they keep asking for a democratic, peaceful, stable Pakistan where political, cultural, economic and religious justice can prevail.

Such traitors don’t belong in this society. Through newspaper columns, television talk shows and official statements – issued under the moral guidance of the Pak Army – we are convincing the people to throw them out. And the international community should help us achieve this noble task.

And we have deployed the most selfless do-gooders to lodge as many cases against him as they possibly can in as many parts of the country as there exist; we have advised police officials to not even so much as ask as to why a case must be lodged in Gilgit-Baltistan for a speech that was, in reality, made in London and heard only in Karachi and possibly Hyderabad. Police stations have been told to not inquire into how and why all the hundreds of complainants against Hussain have experienced personal injury over his words. To back it all up, judges have been instructed to haul Hussain into courtrooms for his verbal excesses; legislators, ministers and media persons have been lined up to condemn his treacherous, traitorous, rebellious utterances. Soon, it is hoped, this menace of a man will be taken care of and we shall live in utter peace and harmony thereafter.

If only that were true. Hussain is prone to historionics and he and his party have a lot to answer over violence in Karachi. His antics can easily be seen as desperate attempts to save his party from wilting under pressure over its well known nexus with organised crime. But making a speech that raises questions about the military’s history should, by no stretch of imagination, be construed to constitute an invitation for an uprising. Numerous writers, poets, intellectuals and activists have done just that in the past, mostly as acts of well justified defiance in the face of a power-hungry military regime. Seeking international help against real or perceived persecution should, by no national or international law, be seen as an act of aggression against the state. Many others, from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Benazir Bhutto and from Nawaz Sharif to Pervez Musharraf (a former military man at that), have secretly or openly sought international intervention when faced with difficult circumstances at home.

And when did getting together to listen to a speech – or to organise the listening of one – become crimes liable to be tried in antiterrorism courts? What happened to the constitutional guarantees of freedom to assembly and freedom of speech? What about all those hundreds of thousands of speeches laced with sectarian hatred, made day in and day out, sometimes even leading to deadly outbreaks of violence? Have police stations in Punjab registered cases against those who organise religious hate speech in Sindh or Balochistan?

The cases against Hussain for making certain remarks and against his supporters for listening to those remarks mark the rise of a new type of blasphemy trials. Anything said or written that can be perceived to have insulted the honour of the armed forces is sacrilege and, therefore, must be treated as such — with cases registered and court hearings conducted. And, just like under the blasphemy laws, the institution being allegedly maligned is not itself lodging those cases — anyone can do that, claiming that his or her feelings having been hurt.

If convicted, what punishment should Hussain and his followers get? Death? For nothing assuages the wrath raised by a blasphemer better than taking him, and his followers, out. And what if the police and the courts fail to prosecute them the way they should be prosecuted? Will they then be lynched by enraged mobs the same way people have been put to death over the blasphemy of religion?

The military and its image consultants should pause and think about the consequences. A party, and its leader, who in the past has done the military’s bidding several times may no longer be required for shoring up support for the next military dictatorship, as they did for both Ziaul Haq and Musharraf. But they should not be pushed to the dustbin of history by making the military a holy cow, punishing everyone who is even remotely perceived to be refusing to pay obeisance to it. The illegal, unconstitutional and ill-advised ways to put down Hussain and his Muttahida Qaumi Movement will create more complications, and possibly more violence, than they intend to address.

This was originally published in Herald's August 2015 issue. To read more, subscribe to Herald's print edition.

Just a look across the border will underscore the futility of it all. Over the last month or so Kashmiris have twice raised the flag of their choice, knowing full well the brutal oppression it could lead to. A state that is bigger, richer and mightier than ours has tried everything it could to force the people of Kashmir into submission. It has only failed. The politics of resistance and protest has always defied the politics of control and power in that region. That has made heroes out of ordinary Kashmiris and martyrs out of men and women who, in a normal situation, would be content to be doting fathers and dutiful housewives.

What failed to work in Kashmir will meet the same fate in Karachi and Lahore and Islamabad. A state that tries to control ideas, suppress freedom and take out the humans it does not like is not worried about securing itself — it is paranoid. The greatest weakness of a paranoid state is that it stretches itself thin over all the things it is scared about. It launches security operations in the country’s biggest city; it sends its thought troops to university campuses, to cyberspace, to cafes; it takes on a nationalist insurgency in the largest province and a religious one in a war zone known as the graveyard of empires. It seeks intrusive authority to look into what people do in cyberspace; it has already acquired the power to detain anyone it deems an enemy alien, disallowing them any legal or constitutional guarantees they may be entitled to; and it is trying people behind closed doors.

And in the wake of its unceasing activities, it is creating foreign agents out of activists, saboteurs out of university teachers and traitors out of citizens. This is exactly what it did in East Pakistan. Did Sabeen Mahmud organise a talk about human rights abuses in Balochistan at her cafe in Karachi because she wanted Balochistan to secede from Pakistan? No, she simply wanted to ensure a free expression of dissident political views, no matter how unpalatable. Suppress them and you will have an armed insurgency to tackle.

Is Taimur Rahman conspiring against Pakistan by being a Marxist, the one who dared to talk about Balochistan in Islamabad after his university in Lahore refused to host an event on the province? He was not even in the original line-up of speakers — his father was. Vilify him and next you have to raid the campuses to clear them of his supporters, the same way you did in University of Dhaka six decades ago. Is every Urdu-speaking resident of Karachi being arrested by the security forces a traitor, the recipient of terrorist training from an Indian intelligence agency? Treat them as such and you’ll face pitched battles in the narrow streets of Landhi and Liaquatabad — as, indeed, you have since 1992.

And yet, the state is unrelenting. It wants everyone to know that security trumps everything in Pakistan as it always has. Even the prime minister, the purported representative of the people, the custodian of the fundamental freedoms as enshrined in the Constitution, tells everyone to shut up since we have serious security problems.

The only way that these security problems can go away is through opening up a national dialogue, a genuinely free national discourse even on the most sensitive of questions confronting the survival of the country. Control, suppression and death have been used too many times and mostly with mixed, indeed, deadly results. A security state spreading itself into every nook and cranny of the national life needs to hold back and let people breathe — breathe the freedom to say what they think, to profess what they believe and to live as they like.

We think, therefore, we are. Our republic and all its working is founded on deep thought: deep individual thought by our civilian and military saviours; deep collective thought by the leaders and readers of public mind. Thinking is our natural national habit.

When there was a crisis beyond our borders, we hunkered down and just thought. When a problem arose within the boundaries of the realm, we got together and did what we have always done think. From foreign policy to national security, from economy to politics, from health and education to the environment, there was nothing that we didn’t think over. We had multiple forums where we did our thinking: if one forum couldn’t somehow bring itself to think, another would rush in to fill the gap. In high offices, in the military’s command-and-control rooms, in the parliament and at All-Parties Conferences, in newspaper columns and television talk shows thinking men, and sometimes thinking women, everywhere, always hard at work. Thank goodness for such a comprehensive process of thinking clearly, we have solved all our problems.

Except for a few minor irritants, of course. To begin with, we only need to decide whether civilian democracy suits us; we only don’t understand what role religion should or should not play in the affairs of state and society; we are only ever so slightly confused about the need for empowering the provinces and regions so that they can create a durable republic that can endure. Also, possibly a couple of other smaller issues, like the division of national resources, distribution of national and individual wealth and incomes and depleting water resources.

Not that we haven’t thought about these issues. We have. We only get distracted. By what is happening in Yemen. By the people who want to return to their homes in a land still claimed both by military and militants. By the demands that we keep our lights switched on and our factories humming with electric power that never takes a break. By this election or that, by this political conflagration or that, by this law-and-order problem or that.

We encounter these day-to-day distractions by, well, not thinking. When a brotherly Muslim country, home to the most sacred Muslim sites in the world and our munificent benefactor of the first and last resort asks for help, should we just ask that it wait before we think through the possible consequences? When those displaced from North Waziristan are told by the military to go back home, why should we stop and ponder over the unconstitutional and utterly inhuman demands being made of them before letting them return to what are essentially their native lands? When another brotherly Muslim country sends us liquefied natural gas, why should we waste our time wondering about its prices? And what about a senate election marred by a last-minute presidential order to keep tribal-area legislators out of the number game, a judicial commission to probe election fraud, continued siege-and-search operations in Karachi by military-led security forces do we really want to think if all these are constitutional or even legal?

While we have done all our thinking already, we can’t really think about such ordinary, day-to-day stuff. Things happen. Somebody does them. Yemen is being taken care of, the displaced are being made to sign on the mortifying dotted line before they head back to their ancestral villages and towns, liquefied natural gas is flowing somewhere and the money for it is also flowing somewhere. Political questions are being addressed.

We, after all, are not standing still. So, why should we think about where we are being moved, for what and by whom?

We think, therefore, we are. That should be sufficient for a people who have already done all their thinking.