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“You are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”
If the Sindh government doesn’t backtrack from the announcement it made last week, students in the province will be able to read this speech, delivered by Mohammad Ali Jinnah on Aug 11, 1947, in school textbooks starting next year.
Read: Quaid’s Aug 11 speech to be included in school curriculum
This is no doubt a welcome move at a time when Pakistan’s minorities are facing horrifying levels of persecution and discrimination, and when the state’s ideology as portrayed in popular discourse is veering further away from the principles of inclusion and pluralism.
It is a particularly savvy move for Sindh, which is home to 94pc of Pakistan’s Hindu community, the country’s largest religious minority, as well as sizeable populations of other religious minorities.
The gesture will help Sindh perpetuate its identity centred on diversity and tolerance for a few more years, even as the ground realities for the province’s minorities become bleaker.
Explore more: Aug 11 speech in textbooks
The politically cynical among us are likely to criticise the Sindh government’s move as a sop, a concession to religious minorities now that the prospect of local government elections stirs again.
After all, the government does not have the capacity, reach or remit to ensure that the speech is taught in classrooms.
Nor can it control how teachers in the province — many of whom will be loath to promote secularism — interpret the speech for their students. But by making this frequently concealed part of Pakistan’s history more readily available, and by implicitly sanctioning the speech’s message through its inclusion in a state-issued textbook, the government is creating opportunities for critical thinking, dialogue and the challenging of dominant, exclusionary narratives.
This is a good place to start.
Let’s consider the optimistic scenario whereby the speech is indeed published in Sindh government textbooks. Is Pakistan ready for more empowered religious minority groups that recognise their fundamental rights as citizens and demand more of the state?
Religious minorities are primarily perceived through the lens of victimhood.
Pakistanis over the past few decades have come to perceive religious minorities primarily through the lens of victimhood. Their role in our socio-political landscape is increasingly to allow liberal-minded and democracy-loving citizens to assuage their guilt and sense of hopelessness through token gestures of tolerance. Think of the warm feelings generated earlier this month by the National Students Federation’s decision to organise a human shield to protect Hindus celebrating Holi at temples in Karachi. The gesture was no doubt generous and symbolically powerful, but it retained the dynamic whereby a munificent majority protects a vulnerable minority.
Our ability to see religious minorities as citizens with rights and agency has been dampened by years of state-enforced discrimination.
Consider the outrage each time news breaks that Hindu families have chosen to migrate to India to escape persecution in Pakistan. Such incidents are inevitably followed by government denials and clumsy attempts to justify the migration (“they have gone for a religious pilgrimage”; “the family has gone for a marriage”).
These denials are partly spurred by geopolitics — the need to prevent India from projecting itself in a positive light as a sanctuary at Pakistan’s expense.
But there exists at some level the need to undermine the agency and independence of minorities who feel entitled to make a choice and opt out.
In a perverse way, this was demonstrated by the lynching that followed the recent Taliban attack on churches in Lahore.
Mob violence is horrifying and no group should ever be allowed to get away with such an act without facing the sternest justice.
But the sad truth is that the lynching of blasphemy accused and criminals is fairly common in Pakistan, and has rarely before attracted the harsh condemnation by political figures that followed last month’s violence by a predominantly Christian mob.
At times, the condemnation of the lynching was stronger than that of the suicide bombings that provoked the violence. This strong reaction was no doubt partly motivated by the sense that a disenfranchised minority group should not presume to demonstrate a show of might or take issues into its own hand.
Hopefully, the inclusion of Jinnah’s Aug 11 speech will help disrupt this mentality in Sindh, and inspire other provinces to emulate the measure. But there’s a long way to go before communalism is displaced by a celebration of our common humanity and equal citizenship.
The fact that religious minorities have a separate stripe on our flag indicates that an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach — one that privileges distinction over unity — is fundamental to Pakistan’s thinking about religious minorities. It will take much more than one speech to eradicate these deep-rooted divides.
The writer is a freelance journalist.
Twitter: @humayusuf
Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2015
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