KARACHI: The hope for India and Pakistan lies in fighting out religious fascism through enlightenment and as long as there are literary festivals in Hyderabad Deccan, Lahore and Karachi, there is hope for all of us, said nuclear scientist and social commentator Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy on the opening day of the 7th Karachi Literature Festival at the Beach Luxury Hotel on Friday.

Dr Hoodbhoy began his keynote address by mentioning one of Fahmida Riaz’s poems in which she said Indians were like Pakistanis. He said he had been hearing about how religious extremism had taken over India in recent times, and gave some examples in that regard, such as the threat that anyone who ate cow’s meat would receive a bullet. Or when Narendra Modi visited a hospital, he said Indians were doing plastic surgery for the past 1,000 years. He said this was the reason that when a few weeks back he received an invite to take part in the Hyderabad Literary Festival, he decided to say yes.

Dr Hoodbhoy said there he read in the papers things such as: during a session in the India Science Conference it was said that Lord Shiva was the greatest environmentalist. He said he got to visit the IIIT (Indian Institute of Information Technology) to know as to what was happening there. He said he also met people who would come up to him and ask him about certain (Hindu) men in history. He said he came to know that there were departments in universities where Vedic mathematics was taught.

Despite that, he said, there was the will to resist all such notions in India. Their newspapers made fun of Modi, he said. The standard of the IIIT in the country was of the level of Harvard or MIT. Their film-makers and novelists were raising their voice against extremism, he said, adding that when three rationalists were killed in India, 1,000 novelists and film-makers signed a petition against it. When a Muslim man was killed for keeping beef in the fridge, scholars protested against it, he said.

Dr Hoodbhoy said what’s common in India and Pakistan was that they were fixated on their past. They were of the view, he said, that they had accomplished great feats in the days of yore. Some in India believed that a thousand years ago there were planes which flew from one planet to another, he said. “We in Pakistan, too, had people like Nasim Hijazi,” he said.

He said if we looked objectively at this phenomenon we would realise that our past wasn’t that good. In the past, people used to die when they reached the age of 40. Teeth would be pulled out without anaesthesia, he said. Today, he said, the world was much more aware. Today, he said, atom was no more a puzzle. He said we should read a book by American scholar Steven Pinker to know that in ancient times there was much more bloodshed than now. He said today DNA could tell us about ourselves.

Going back to Fahmida Riaz’s assertion that Indians and Pakistanis were alike, he said till now Indians hadn’t proved to be like Pakistanis, because here in Pakistan we had individuals like Mumtaz Qadri and Maulvi Abdul Aziz who openly challenged the state, and the state could do nothing about it. However, he said, India also had dangerous people, for example those who belonged to the RSS. If India was not able to control them, then they’d be like us, he said. The hope, he said, for India and Pakistan lay in fighting out religious fascism through enlightenment. Society could be peaceful if those who were in the fields of art and literature played their due role, he said. He said as long as there are literary festivals, there was hope for all of us.

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2016

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