Sabeen Mahmud is murdered. A faculty member of Karachi University is also assassinated. A draconian, unyielding cybercrime bill is moved. The Lahore University of Management Sciences cannot have a conversation on Balochistan with Mama Qadeer as a speaker. Taimur Rahman, a LUMS faculty member who stands up for freedom of speech, is ridiculously pilloried as a traitor on social media and in sections of the press.

Authorities at higher education regulatory bodies reportedly send letters to vice-chancellors of universities to ensure that ‘anti-state’ topics are not taken up as research topics for theses. All of the above occurred over the last few weeks. What does the state want from the people of Pakistan? In what direction is our state/society headed?

Teachers, thinkers and writers shape our future. It is these very people we are trying to silence.

Sabeen was a friend. Losing a loved one is hard: most of us know this pain well. But Sabeen was much more. She was a role model — a high-spirited defender of the rights of all, a mentor for many, an entrepreneur, an educator, a music/poetry lover, an indefatigable supporter of democracy and accountable governance, and a splendidly evolved moral being. She was the kind of person you want to clone and have many more of, the kind of person you fall in love with after only the briefest of introductions and conversations.

Read: Director T2F Sabeen Mahmud shot dead in Karachi

Yet, she was murdered. And given the circumstances of her death, the state is one of the prime suspects. Could Pakistan and Pakistanis be in a worst situation?

Why is the state in Pakistan so afraid of Pakistanis talking or thinking about issues that matter to us? Why does the state want to tell us what we should or should not talk of, how we should go about talking about something and who should or should not be allowed to talk.

It is a moot point to iterate that the Constitution gives the people the right to think and speak their mind. And it is not up to the intelligence agencies, or any other group, to tell us what we should or should not be thinking. Even if a person transgresses any bounds it is up to the administrative, legislative and judicial arms to address the issue. If ‘ideological boundaries’ are to be protected, it has to be done by these institutions and not by the intelligence agencies. And intimidation, criminalising thought and word, and murder are not the means that should be employed to defend any perceived or real ‘boundaries’.

J.S. Mill, the author of On Liberty, and one of the greatest polymaths of all times, had a more interesting, important and first-order defence of the right to free speech. He felt that innovation, entrepreneurship, and moral courage in society are all related to the existence of eccentricity and the ability to express that eccentricity. Conformity can deaden a society: “In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

Mill went on to argue that if you impose eccentricity and silence expression of opinion, it is a disservice to humanity and posterity. If you cannot hear what opposing arguments are, and from the most convinced of your opponents, how can you know that you are correct, and if you are wrong, how will you know that you are indeed mistaken?

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

It is the teachers, thinkers, writers, innovators and entrepreneurs who are going to shape our future. And it is these very people we are trying to silence and allowing to be killed. Did military might succeed in keeping the country together in 1970? Can it do so if another such time comes? If the country is to stay together, it is our ability to think through, imagine and create a common future that will do it. By suppressing and/or killing our thinkers, what inevitability are we heading towards?

The state is responsible for protecting citizens. Here, the state is not only failing miserably in its duty to protect, it is often suspected to be a perpetrator. We do not have any trust in most organs of the state. Not only that, organs of the state react virulently and violently to any call for holding the state accountable. If citizens are missing, it is our duty to talk about it and demand accountability. Rather than assure us of its non-culpability and offer itself for accountability, the state resorts to suppressing thought that it does not like, intimidates citizens and does not even shy away from inflicting violence on citizens that it thinks are not toeing the state’s line.

If Sabeen Mehmuds are not allowed to flourish in Pakistan and Taimur Rahmans treated as traitors, we are headed for a very bleak future. And the present is not too bright either. Can those multitudes in the state who are suffering from deep myopia wake up? Can those who can see a bit further challenge the status quo?

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at LUMS, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2015

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