An unrepentant politician

[This is the second of a three part series]

“PAKISTANI politics have long been characterized by provocative rhetoric. But even by their over-heated standards, Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister, has some startling things to say,” wrote John Thornhill, the Financial Times journalist who interviewed Bhutto in London in early August.

What was the statement that drew this comment from the interviewer? It is worth quoting it at length. “I believe that there would never have been the World Trade Centre attack, the bombing of Afghanistan and the hair-raising tension of a possible nuclear conflict with India had there not been the predominance of the military in the politics of Pakistan,” she said.

In other words, had Pakistan been left in the hands of the politicians the events that redefined the world order would not have happened. The Taliban would not have taken control over most of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda associates would not have established themselves in Afghanistan, nineteen exceptionally angry Arab men would not have sacrificed their lives and attacked the United States on September 11, and the war on global terrorism would not have been launched under the leadership of the United States.

We can continue with the counter-factuals suggested by Benazir Bhutto. Had the politicians retained power, Pakistan would not have become a central player in the war against terrorism. The importance assigned to Pakistan led to a reaction by India and the start of yet another “near-war” between Pakistan and India. That would not have happened and the world would not have faced the possibility, as it did in the spring of this year, of a nuclear holocaust in South Asia.

There are two problems with this line of thinking and the world view it represents. I am much more concerned with the second problem, but let me first state the first. In saying what she said, Benazir Bhutto is reinventing history. This was recognized by John Thornhill in the long article he wrote for the Financial Times based on the interview with her. “But times have changed and the extent of her political popularity remains uncertain. Both governments she led were dismissed early amid accusations of widespread corruption. General Musharraf’s denunciations of Pakistan’s ‘sham’ democracy that have left the people with nothing but unsustainable foreign debt have much political resonance. Besides, Ms Bhutto was in office at the time of the Kashmir insurgency in 1989 and again in 1994 when Pakistan first gave support to the Taliban movement in Afghanistan,” wrote Thornhill.

The second problem with the former prime minister’s approach is more troubling. She is not prepared to accept any responsibility for the harm done to Pakistan during the time she and her opposition were in power. The 1990s have been rightly described as Pakistan’s most wasted decade. Let us see what happened to the country’s economy between 1989 and 1999.

In the quarter century before the return of civilian politicians to power, Pakistan had enjoyed a reasonable rate of economic growth. Between 1965 and 1989, per capita income had increased at a respectable rate of 2.5 per cent a year. In India, the rate of increase was considerably lower - only 1.8 per cent a year. Not only was this a comforting performance, the growth trajectory pointed in the right direction. The rate of GDP growth had accelerated, from 5.2 per cent a year in 1965-1980 to 6.4 per cent a year in 1980-1989. Assuming population growth rates in these two periods at three per cent and 2.8 per cent respectively, the GDP increases translated into per capita income increases of 2.2 per cent and 3.6 per cent a year.

Some economists follow a rule of thumb according to which per capita income increase 25 per cent higher than the rate of growth of population should make a significant dent in the incidence of poverty. In 1980-89, income per head in Pakistan increased at a rate 29 per cent higher than the rate of growth of population. As should have been expected, there was, as a result, a significant decline in the level of poverty. According to one estimate, by 1989 the proportion of people living in poverty had declined to below 20 per cent. In other words, in 1989 Pakistan had about 20 million people classified as the absolute poor - a small number compared to the situation that was to emerge a decade later.

It is useful to recall two other sets of numbers - gross domestic investment rates and the burden of external debt — in order to develop a reasonably comprehensive picture of Pakistan in 1989 and 1999. In 1980-89, gross domestic investment increased at the rate of 5.7 per cent a year, nearly three times the rate of growth of 2.4 per cent per annum in the fifteen-year period between 1965 and 1980. However, since gross domestic savings had declined from 13 per cent of gross domestic product to only 11 per cent, all of the increase in investment was financed from external capital flows. In 1989, Pakistan had an external debt of $18.5 billion.

Let us now look at the performance of the economy during the decade of the nineties. The increase in gross domestic product dropped to only four per cent in 1990-99. With population now increasing at the rate of 2.7 per cent a year, this meant an increase in per capita income of only 1.3 per cent a year. This was less than fifty per cent of the rate of increase in population.

One reason for the decline in the rate of GDP growth was a significant reduction in investment. The rate of investment declined from 19 per cent of the gross domestic product in 1990 to a paltry 15 per cent in 1999. This decline was the consequence of a sharp reduction in external capital flows. By then both official development assistance and foreign direct investment had come to a virtual stop. Pakistan was popular neither with the governments that provided aid nor with private investors.

This fall in foreign capital flows should have meant a reduction in the rate at which the country was adding to its debt burden. That did not happen for the reason that the country failed to increase its export earnings. This was an extraordinary feat since the decade of the 1990s saw an unprecedented increase in global trade. Pakistan had no share in this expansion. Instead, its balance of trade continued to increase. In 1999, Pakistan ran a deficit of $2.3 billion on the trade account compared to a deficit of $966 million in 1990. Since neither aid nor foreign direct investment was arriving in any significant amount, Islamabad’s policymakers resorted to expensive, short-term borrowing to pay for the large and growing trade deficit.

In 1998, Pakistan’s external debt was estimated at $34.3 billion. It had added $16 billion to its debt burden over the ten-year period of democratic rule. It was now a heavily indebted poor country with debt outstanding equivalent to 43 per cent of the gross national income.

But large external borrowing was not the only way the country financed the bills it could not pay from its own resources. The government had also resorted to heavy borrowing from the domestic markets to finance a large budgetary deficit. Domestic debt increased dramatically during this period. Combined with what the country owed to outside creditors, by the time the military intervened in 1999, Pakistan’s total debt — both foreign and domestic — was equal to its gross national income. By then debt had also become a drag on economic growth since the government spent some two-fifths of its total revenues on paying interest and principal to its creditors.

A sharp increase in the incidence of poverty was the inevitable consequence of the slowdown in GDP growth. According to a survey carried out in 1997, the incidence of poverty had increased to 37.3 per cent of the population. This meant that by 1999, Pakistan had 50 million people living in absolute poverty in a population of 134.8 million. Over the ten-year period during which Ms. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and Mian Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League were alternately in power, the country saw more than doubling of the size of the pool of poverty — from 20 million in 1989 to 50 million in 1999. During this period, therefore, the number of people living in poverty increased at the extraordinary rate of 9.6 per cent a year — three and a half times the rate of increase in population.

Loss in the momentum of growth, heavy build-up in debt, failure to better integrate the country into the global economy, a rapid increase in the number of people living in poverty are some of the ways in which the lost decade of the 1990s manifested itself. The state failed also in a spectacular way to provide basic social service to a rapidly increasing population. In fact, in the last decade we saw significantly reduced progress on major social indicators such as life expectancy, maternal mortality, infant and child mortality, literacy and education. This is exactly what should be expected in a period of sharply reduced economic growth. So we are not just talking about dry economic statistics here: It is the lives and health of tens of millions of people that have been stunted.

In her interview with the Financial Times quoted earlier, Ms. Bhutto claims that had she been allowed to govern in the 1990s, the rise of militant Islam would not have happened in Pakistan, Taliban would not have taken control of Afghanistan, and the terrorists would not have struck America on September 11. And yet, it is the failure of the state during the time that she shared power with her opposition that we saw the rise of madrassah education which was to fuel the growth of radical Islam in Pakistan. As is now well recognized, it is the graduates from the madaris who provided thousands of leaders and foot soldiers to the Islamic causes that were pursued around the globe.

According to Najum Mushtaq who wrote a report on madaris published recently by the International Crisis Group, “the original purpose of madaris was education but that tradition has all but vanished.” Madaris which teach Islam and train clergy have been in existence for a thousand years but it was only in the 1990s that they became a strong social and political force in Pakistan. There were only 245 madaris in Pakistan at the time of the country’s birth in 1947. By 1995, when Ms. Benazir Bhutto was in power, 3,906 madaris were registered with the government. According to a recent New York Times story on religious education in Pakistan, the government now says it believes there are 10,000 madaris providing education in the country to some one million students, mostly boys and mostly in towns and cities. “A problem as worrisome as religious extremism is that many madaris provide little learning relevant to jobs outside mosques, or beyond the 18th century curriculum that most madaris use.” Pakistan’s politicians must take full responsibility for this unhappy development.

(To be concluded)

Speech Vajpayee may never make

HERE is the speech we may not quite hear on August 15 when Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee climbs up the ramparts of the Red Fort to start yet another birthday party for India:

Friends (in the BJP), Indians (in cities and villages) and countrymen (across the world)! You were kind enough to elect me, and support me if you could not vote, in a general election three years ago because I was the prime minister of economic reform, the Lahore peace initiative and Kargil.

Since then reform has tripped over uncertainty, while those old-fashioned rogues and sharks who hover over public money have continued to steal and loot thousands of crores with impunity, bribing their way through any problem, laughing their way through media and politicians, and fattening the foreign accounts of men at the head of financial institutions who sold their trust unit by unit and betrayed blue chip companies like IDBI chip by chip.

In self-defence I will say that I did not create this scum. I inherited this class from decades of misrule and corruption, of deals between money power and political authority at the cost of your development, your jobs, your schools, your hospitals, your roads, your hunger. Where my self-defence collapses is in the fact that I too did nothing to heal this corrosive cancer that has gnawed at the heart and soul of our country. Our tryst with destiny was not meant to suffocate in sleaze. I am guilty of indifference. And I will tell you the reason for my indifference. Because my own party, which was born and nurtured in puritan zeal, has become a mob of sleazebags.

I know many of you — let’s make that most of you — do not share the ideology and beliefs of men like Shyamaprasad Mukherjee and Deendayal Upadhyay. I mention these names because they were my leaders when I was a young man with a dream. I have become an old man now, and I am not certain whether I have the courage to dream any more... But even those who would not want Shyamaprasadji and Deendayalji to lead India will admit and accept that they did not enter public life to split the scum with hyenas.

They were honest men who died with less in their bank accounts than they had inherited. What a tragedy therefore that my lifetime colleague and deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advaniji should be giving orders to BJP leaders to compete with the Congress in petty corruption.

My petrol pump is smaller than yours! Your scam is bigger than mine! My Ram Naik is nothing compared to your S.M. Krishna and even watch out for this one, Manmohan Singh! Ha ha ha. What a sight we must be to voters who thought that we were capable of their trust, who believed that we knew the meaning of a faded word known as integrity. I am truly sorry. As prime minister of the country, as leader of the BJP, I know that the buck, even the corrupt buck, stops here.

You made me prime minister, as I said, because of reform, the promise of transparency, the hope of peace and a dream of prosperity. Instead, I have become prime minister of Tehelka, sleaze, scams, petrol pumps and Narendra Modi. I must say a deliberate word about Tehelka, particularly since I have been re-reading my friend Advaniji’s prison diaries, written when we were in jail together. Normally people do not advertize prison terms. We are proud that we went to jail during Mrs Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975 - I wonder how many of you even remember that blot of shame in our nation’s history. If you do not know about the Emergency, ask your parents, ask your teachers to drill that memory so deeply in your mind that it becomes an imperishable part of your consciousness. We must never forget, if only to ensure that it never happens again.

Advaniji has written so eloquently about those nineteen months of dictatorship, censorship and terror. I remember when we won the elections in 1977 and Advaniji became minister for information and broadcasting in Morarji Desai’s government, he taunted all those journalists who had surrendered before Indira Gandhi, who had compromised. Advaniji told them that when Indira Gandhi had asked such journalists to bend, they had crawled.

I cannot believe that it is the same Advaniji who is inflicting a reign of terror on selected journalists from Tehelka, whose only crime is that they exposed outrageous and scandalous corruption in defence deals. I cannot believe that I am keeping quiet while journalists are being arrested on whimsical excuses. I have always respected those who live by the pen. Alas, I have not been able to live on my poetry, but I think my pen may have served my country as much as my politics, if not more.

What further irony in the fact that we are being vengeful against journalists in order to protect a shining hero of the Emergency, my old colleague George Fernandes. How time makes dwarfs out of giants. As a collective gesture of atonement, I am asking the home ministry to drop all frivolous cases against Tehelka, and to end the harassment and persecution that has replaced accountability.

My colleagues in the BJP have made me prime minister of Narendra Modi as well. I did not want this. As I said in parliament, I had made my mind up before that party conference in Goa, where everything went wrong, including my own speech, that Modi should be told to resign. I should have trusted my instincts instead of being cowed down by those who wanted victory at the cost of principle. The BJP has been called a communal party. But till Gujarat I could hold my head high and claim that the BJP, when in power, had never permitted any large-scale communal riots. Of course we could not stop communal incidents, including those engineered by members of our own party. But we ran responsible governments. We did not use state power to encourage lynch mobs. That was a Congress speciality.

I slipped on blood shed in Goa. After the contemptible barbarism of Godhra I should have ensured that a community was not punished for the wild misdeeds of a few. Revenge is no answer to barbarism. We criticized Rajiv Gandhi after the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. There was provocation then as well. But we took a moral position and I am proud we did so. I cannot reverse time but I do want to ensure an election that is held without the slightest hint of terror and fully participated by every citizen. Gujarat will be placed under president’s rule till a new elected government is sworn in. As will be Kashmir.

The tensions generated over Kashmir constitute the gravest danger to our subcontinent. It is a crisis that is eating away our present and could destroy our future. You, I hope, will agree I have done my best to find peace ever since I was fortunate enough to become prime minister of this great nation. Acting upon our commitment to the people as clearly outlined in our manifesto, we made India a nuclear power. The world tried to browbeat us; today it has accepted our nuclear status as a legitimate right of an important nation.

But we cannot be a true world power without being a powerhouse economy. And a great economy is impossible without the will to release our national wealth and energy for infrastructure, and capital for the biggest as well as the smallest. Industry must hum with growth at every level, from the roar of heavy industry to the gentle tap of a master craftsman. I dream of the day when shops across the country and the world will be full of Made in India labels, because everything Indian will be both best in the world and best value in the world.

But I am not a cook of khayali pulao. I know that peace will not be easy. I wish we could live in peace with Pakistan. We did not seek war with Pakistan. Pakistan launched an unprovoked war within ten weeks of partition. If those raiders had not crossed into Jammu and Kashmir in October 1947, there would not be a Kashmir problem. Even today efforts continue to snatch by war what could not be got by peace. I would like to make it absolutely clear that India will never be held hostage at the point of a gun.

But we are a mature nation and a mature people. We know that problems can be resolved only through dialogue; to walk together we need to build bridges together. We are committed to a peaceful resolution of all problems.

I know that many of my fellow Indians in Jammu and Kashmir are angry with Delhi and its policies particularly over the last 15 years. There was joy and harmony in the province during the days of the great Sheikh Abdullah. He was elected in a free and fair election, through an expression of the people’s will. I am determined to ensure that the same free and fair spirit awaits the coming assembly elections. The elected representatives who emerge from such an election will find a place on the high table as together we chart a route map towards peace and prosperity.

I offered my hand of friendship to Pakistan at Lahore. I was saddened when Lahore became Kargil. That hand could also turn into steel if required. We have over the past year witnessed terrible acts of terror, on December 13 and a number of times after that, but we have held our patience and prudence, sometimes at great cost. The world has appreciated such prudence. I want to offer a hand of friendship again, because I know the difference between a dream and a nightmare. The first is life; the second is death.

The writer is editor-in-chief of ‘Asian Age’, New Delhi.

Independence day thoughts

FRANKLY speaking, I am not able to excite myself about August 14 because we have made such a mess of the Pakistan that was created the next day. I am old enough not to forget the 15th of August, the day this country actually came into being. (All newspapers of the time say so, and they couldn’t be lying).

Nobody has been able to convince me about August 14 as the country’s birthday. Was the date adopted to keep one day ahead of India? Anyway, for me it is the Quaid-e-Azam who embodies Pakistan, the only unsullied memory connected with it, and I would rather talk about him than about the sorry decades of independence.

Fifty-four years ago I was one of the thousands upon thousands who walked with the bier of the father of the nation from the Governor-General’s House in Karachi to what is now his last resting place. As I try to recall those moments the memory is not that of a citizen realising the loss to his country but of an emotional shock in which thoughts for the future had no place. The only question that tortured the mind was, “Why, oh God, why did he have to go?”

It was like losing one’s father. When that death strikes, you do not think of its implications and the result of the sudden void — what will happen to you and the family; what will be the problems. No, none of these realities arise to face you. The mind is numbed. What hits you is the sudden absence, the impact of the sudden loss. It is the heat that is involved; not yet the brain.

I don’t know if I am really able to convey what I want to say. Just as in a very personal tragedy it is not possible for you to describe the wrench, the painful tug at the heart strings, the sense of getting lost, the feeling that nothing matters after this, the Quaid’s going was like that. I have talked with many contemporaries. They too remember it as a personal loss.

Other things like what the old man meant to Pakistan, how he was sorely needed, and what we should do to keep his memory alive — all these came later, much later, when we had developed hypocrisy as a national trait and had started talking about following in his footsteps and all that.

There are so many exceptional qualities as a lead that the Quaid possessed. They are being referred to all the time by writers and speakers. I would rather talk of those of his attributes with which many Pakistanis are not well acquainted.

For example, how many people know that a couple of days after August 15, he and Miss Fatima Jinnah attended a special thanksgiving service in a Karachi church, a service dedicated to the strength and welfare of the new country. (I have written of this before in the context of the minorities, and so has Mr Ardeshir Cowasjee).

Elderly Christian residents of that city recall fondly that Mr Jinnah was very happy to be among them. He wanted them to feel that Pakistan was as much their home as that of the Indian Muslims for whom he had secured it as a homeland. Those who have known the Quaid intimately relate how excruciatingly painful were the January 1948 riots in Karachi and Hyderabad in which many non-Muslims lost their lives. He almost wept with anguish before the late Jamshed Nusserwanji who had come to console him.

He took these riots to heart because, coming so soon after the August holocaust, they shattered his dream of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which there would be no second class citizens. It had never entered his calculations that people would be forced to leave their ancestral homes and go away to India just because they were Hindus and Sikhs.

No wonder therefore that the minorities of Pakistan accord greater reverence to his memory than the majority community whose tribute to him is mostly in the form of lip service.

The Quaid is often remembered as a brilliant parliamentarian in the central legislature of India, a quality that made him invincible inside the House. But what made his role truly unique was the fact that he gave his support to the opposition or lent his weight to the treasury benches strictly on the merits of the matter under discussion. Our legislators can well take a leaf from his book to their advantage and self-respect. That is, if they can afford to be honest and principled.

Let us recall that the Quaid left the bulk of his financial assets to some of the oldest Muslim educational institutions in the country. That was his way of highlighting the importance he gave to education for his people. Unfortunately the highlights were switched off soon after his death and education became a routine preoccupation of successive governments.

Let us also recall that for most of his political life he kept his sister by his side. He could not have chosen a better way to express his respect and reverence for women and the role he expected them to play in the affairs of the nation. That this faith in the ability of women to share in the fate of his people was totally justified was proved long after his passing away when the combined opposition to Field Marshal Ayub — including all the religious parties — chose Miss Jinnah as its candidate for the highest executive office in the country. It is a different matter that some of them later found the appointment of Benazir Bhutto as un-Islamic.

Let us recall also the Quaid’s total commitment to democracy as a political and national way of life. On no occasion, not even in an unguarded moment, did he speak of an alternative system of government for Pakistan. So much so that his references to a possible Islamic form of government too were in the context of parliamentary democracy. One can now understand why General Ziaul Haq did not offer fateha at his mazar during any visit to Karachi. Maybe he tried to imagine how the ultra democrat in Mr Jinnah would receive the homage of a military dictator and that kept him away.

There is so much in the memory of the founding father that moves, edifies and inspires one, while any examination of our history of the last 55 years merely causes depression, defeat and frustration. You will understand now why I chose to talk about him on Independence Day.

Crying in the chapel

LET’S indulge in a bit of wishful thinking. Let’s imagine a different Pakistan. A Pakistan whose founding fathers were quick off the mark in establishing the rule of law and institutionalizing democracy. A Pakistan whose first generation of politicians had devoted themselves to meeting the needs of the people rather than satisfying their own worldly desires.

A Pakistan where priority was attached from the outset to universalizing education and health care. A Pakistan whose armed forces had devoted themselves exclusively to national defence and never had to go to war — either against their own people or anyone else. A Pakistan that had lost no time in shedding its feudal accoutrements, and whose leaders had concentrated on sowing the seeds of equitableness through a redistribution of wealth and democratic control of the means of production.

Let us posit a Pakistan that established an independent foreign policy, and was counted among the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement at Bandung rather than CENTO or SEATO. A nation that redeemed Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s pledge to establish secularism and never gave a thought to sectarianism or the sort of confessionalism that involves seeing adherents of other faiths as mortal foes. A state populated mainly by Muslims, perhaps, but also by Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, atheists, Buddhists and others, without any discrimination, condescension or the embarrassment of separate electorates.

Such a Pakistan may not exactly have become a regional exemplar. Its progress may have been interrupted by the odd coup d’etat, which was once the United States’ favourite method of punishing nations that failed to follow its diktat. It would, at one point or another, have been affected by turmoil, which can sometimes be an engine of progress. It would nonetheless have been able to command respect among the comity of nations. Even during periods of unrest and uncertainty, no one would have been able to dismiss it as a failed state.

This scenario does beg one key question: If a secular, democratic nation with a progressive social agenda was the intention, wherefore did the need for partition arise?

It is a good question.

There is broad agreement among credible historians that if Jinnah and the Congress leadership had been aware of the price that would have to be paid in human terms, they would have striven harder to avoid partition. Fifty-five years on from the birth pangs of Pakistan and an independent India, the bitterness and the pain shows no signs of letting up. By no means is Kashmir the only culprit in this respect. The recent pogroms in Gujarat had little to do with Kashmir, nor is the dispute in that territory related to acts of violence against non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan.

The vision outlined above seems almost utopian. That’s a reflection of the dysfunctional and dystopian reality.

In the run-up to independence day, an utterly appalling sequence of events has underlined the morass that Pakistan finds itself in. First there was the Meerwala case, in which a village panchayat reportedly decreed that a young woman be gang-raped as punishment for an alleged indiscretion by her teenage brother, who had by then apparently already been sodomized multiple times for being found in the company of an older girl from a rival clan. The panchayat not only passed a barbaric sentence but enthusiastically ensured that it was carried out.

There may be more to the tale than meets the eye, but what has thus far been reported is ugly enough. Of course, no one has ever entertained too many illusions about the nature of feudal “justice”, whose innumerable excesses normally go unreported. The Mastoi-Gujjar fracas not only shows how thoughtlessly cruel the wielders of petty authority can be, but also serves as a reminder of the significance still attached to notions of caste.

The attention attracted by the case has in many parts of the world confirmed suspicions that many Pakistanis continue to dwell in the Dark Ages. And while it is somehow not entirely inappropriate that the Meerwala perpetrators should be tried by an anti-terrorism court — regardless of how one generally perceives ad-hoc institutions of this nature — the extraordinary judicial proceedings also illustrate how rare it is for such cases to come to light. Whether or not justice is seen to be done, it is unlikely that the verdict will act as an effective deterrent against the callousness and cruelty to which the weaker sections of society are systematically subjected.

That women bear the brunt in most instances of societal evil was emphasized once more in the Abbakhel case, where convicted murderers sought to escape the noose by offering their young daughters in marriage to their victims’ aged relatives. It was the Supreme Court’s judicious intervention in this case that was unusual, rather than the tendency to treat women and girls as disposable bargaining chips.

The goings-on in Meerwala and Abbakhel are symptomatic of a deep-rooted socio-economic disorder, just as the trend whereby self-ordained saviours in military uniform seek to perpetuate their reign via an unconvincing half-nod towards popular representation signifies an equally entrenched political malaise. Widespread apathy allows such unfortunate afflictions to thrive. Not only are attempts at treatment infrequent, but they are invariably directed towards the symptoms rather than the disease. As a consequence, the prognosis for Pakistan is pathetic.

However, if that were all, it could at least be characterized, albeit shamefully, as business as usual. Although they, too, are part of a pattern, last week’s atrocities in Jhika Gali and Taxila do not fall in the same category. Not yet anyway.

The murderous attacks on a missionary school and a Christian hospital were evidently carried out by a breed even more repulsive and treacherous than feudal potentates: religious zealots, who enjoy access to lethal weapons but not to any form of enlightenment. In their bigoted little brains they carry the ridiculous notion that they are striking a blow on behalf of Islam by slaughtering innocent, unarmed civilians. They may perceive themselves as soldiers of the faith, but in fact they are no more than uncommon criminals, and it is important that the rest of society should see them as such.

What’s more, their actions are suggestive of extreme cowardice. If they are angry about George W. Bush’s “crusade”, there is no dearth of American troops in the region for them to take on. The pros and cons of Islamabad’s alliance with the US in the so-called war against terror are eminently debatable. But there can be no justification whatsoever, by any stretch of the imagination, for targeting Christians in general, be they Pakistanis or foreign missionaries. Or, for that matter, aid workers or diplomats.

It is vital that the Jhika Gali and Taxila incidents should attract the widest possible condemnation, not only from the government but from various leaders of public opinion — perhaps especially those who cloak themselves in religiosity. This has not yet happened, partly because the attitude towards these outrages among the people in general is seen as ranging from indifference to a certain sympathy for the perpetrators rather than their victims. But that is precisely why it is so essential relentlessly to hammer home the message that such attacks are evil and intolerable.

Last week’s events were not the first time innocent Christians have been victimized by irrational reactionaries — and it probably won’t be the last. The multiplicity of potential targets increases the danger, but it also points to the crucial role missionary institutions have played in providing education and health care to successive generations of Pakistanis. Some of the best schools and hospitals in Pakistan have been run by missionaries. Many of them are remnants of the British Raj, and their raison d’etre would gradually have been eroded after independence had the state taken its responsibilities in these spheres more seriously. That was not to be. Imagine the vacuum that would be created in the nation’s educational system in particular were all Christian institutions suddenly to cease operations.

It is not, however, the prospect of such an irreparable loss that should drive all sensible Pakistanis to the defence of their Christian compatriots. That gesture need reflect no more than a common humanity, a shared nationality.

Pakistani Christians are an innocuous minority whose loyalty to the state has never been in doubt, and who have contributed disproportionately to the nation’s development. They have more or less consistently been discriminated against. Now some of the most nefarious elements in society are out to crucify them. We can’t stand aside and let that happen.

Jinnah would have been devastated had he known what Pakistan would look like 55 years after independence. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi would probably have been equally repulsed had they been offered a snapshot of India in 2002.

The past must be studied and ought, perhaps, to be viewed as a series of missed opportunities. But it cannot be changed. That’s not true of the future, however. Many aspects of the nation and its self-image need to be reimagined, but a different Pakistan certainly is possible. Whether it will ever be achieved remains an open question.

That will depend, among a plethora of other factors, on whether we are able to mark this independence day in a manner that doesn’t mock the existing circumstances. For a change, let’s not wave the flag — which, in the light of recent events, ought not to be hoisted beyond half-mast anyway. Some August 14 down the line may provide genuine cause for celebration, but jubilation would be highly inappropriate today.

Instead, as a gesture of solidarity, let’s solemnly fetch up at the nearest chapel. Say a little prayer, if you are so inclined. And shed a few tears.