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RASHID Rehman Khan, lawyer and human rights activist, was gunned down in cold blood for defending a young man accused of committing blasphemy. The most remarkable thing about this sordid incident is not its rabid senselessness, which is infinite, but the feeling of familiarity it so readily evokes. We’ve all been here before, and multiple times at that. Placards and chart-papers carrying slogans of protest, drawn up after Taseer’s assassination three years ago, haven’t been allowed a coat of dust as yet.
What follows are loud condemnations, silent vigils, and public expressions of grief and anger — all part of routinised, disconcertingly mechanical performances of outrage and dissent; just another act in what’s turning out to be a fast-paced pantomime, starring an unravelling state and a fascistic society.
Rashid, and the HRCP team in Punjab, had identified the individuals who were threatening him for doing his job, but this was clearly not enough. The local authorities exhibited inaction, while the prosecuting lawyer — one of those guilty of making these threats — merely shrugged his shoulders and proclaimed he was carrying out the will of every Muslim.
Such forms of violence are now widespread, and manifest themselves in multiple ways on a daily basis. With the risk of being caught, let alone prosecuted, at an all-time low, the field remains fertile for groups with all sorts of vile agendas to grow their roots and prosper.
The fact of the matter is that every society has its share of exclusivist, hate-spewing individuals. After all, contested visions of how people should behave, how they should worship, and who deserves the privilege of lording over others, are organic to diverse populations. What mitigates these visions into mere slander or sloganeering, though, are legal safeguards backed by credible sanction. Ideally, you can say whatever you want, wherever you want, but you can’t use violence and intimidation as a crutch for your agenda.
Pakistan suffers on two accounts. It has a seemingly limitless supply of groups holding myopic visions of what the country should be like, the ideal laws that should govern our lives, and the space and societal roles that minorities, or smaller sects, should be limited to. They occupy different positions in universities, in the media, within the political sphere, and in nearly every other nook and cranny of public life.
They are echoed through that extended (or immediate) family member who adds a ‘but’ while condemning Qadri, or the growing, and often vocal, reticence in accepting minority sects as part of a ‘wider community’. In this and every other sense, they conjure up frequent reminders of a near-universal existence, and of the growing numbers who share the same vision.
This alone, however, is a resolvable problem. It can, hypothetically speaking, be dealt with politically and intellectually, through active counter-organisation in all these aforementioned spaces, and by challenging the monopoly over academic interpretations that lead to such exclusivist understandings of what religion dictates, and what an ideal society should look like.
It is that other failing, though, that complete and utter inability, or unwillingness, to curtail the use of force, which turns a potential slide into the active freefall that it is now.
Intimidation and violence are by now deeply embedded as meaningful recourse in societal debate; instruments of a sort that can be used to ‘put people in their place’ — people like Rashid Rehman who in his own words was merely doing something that has to be done, ie undertaking the simple, quietly heroic act of providing defence to a man facing a complicit state apparatus, an archaic legal system and an angry mob.
What we often see as an immediate reaction to any such acts of violence is a call for ‘strengthening the state’.
The rationale underscoring such appeals is that a stronger security and judicial apparatus will be able to prevent violence, provide requisite sanction, and balance out what is by now an incredibly tilted playing field. Unfortunately, well-intentioned as these pleas may be, they miss out on the fact that these institutions remain embroiled in perpetuating this very violence and exclusivism at every level.
The most recent example of this is from just 10 days ago, when religious groups, many of whom are involved in exactly the kind of everyday violence and coercion that took the life of Rashid Rehman, paid homage to the bravery and competence of the ‘greatest’ state institution. It really begs the question of how can one reasonably ask for a crackdown on such groups when the state so readily draws legitimacy from their actions?
For at least the past six years, liberals and progressives in Pakistan have backed the state to come clean, make a break from its murky, complicit past, and crack down on religious extremists. What they have gotten in return is more complicity, more incoherence, and zero indication of either willingness or an ability to undertake a course much different from the one charted merrily for the past many decades.
Perhaps more chilling is what this impasse cruelly exposes — paucity of option and poverty of imagination. Extremism can’t be fought out in public spaces for fear of being killed, and the state can’t be coaxed into helping out because it clearly doesn’t want to or is simply unable to.
Maybe those advocating silent withdrawal in the face of such insurmountable odds are right. If nothing else, it leaves one with the option of seeing exactly how far this mess will unravel.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
