A woman is bashed to death with a brick for marrying a man of her choice near the premises of the Lahore High Court, a US-based cardiologist of Pakistani origin, an Ahmadi, who returns home every year to serve poor patients in the land of his birth, is shot dead in Chenab Nagar (formerly Rabwah) and the umpteenth Shia doctor is mowed down by armed motorcyclists in Karachi.

Eyes shut one can also say that while this murder and mayhem is taking place, somewhere in the land of the pure someone is being accused of blasphemy, a charge (with or without merit) carrying a near-certain death penalty or incarceration without hope of release.

It may be another matter that the death sentence is almost never carried out by the state. The executioners could range from faith-inspired lynch mobs to armed lone crusaders. But what is unambiguous is that once charged the clock to your violent end starts ticking.

Are we in a state of collective denial? It’s difficult to say.

Of course, it is against the law to falsely accuse someone of such a repugnant crime. But one would struggle to find a single legal precedent in the book being thrown at an accuser for falsely accusing someone of blasphemy. Protestations of the accused no matter how convincing have almost never been deemed convincing enough.

Against such a backdrop, I suspect the reader by now must feel some of the columnists are mad, naïve, on auto-pilot or just thick-skinned so that reality, the untold ugly, slap-in-the-face reminders do nothing to dampen their optimism; that they continue to find the light at the end of the tunnel.

But it has been said that while there is life there is hope. It is also true that when one hits rock bottom the only way to go is up. Given the current situation even these two sentences sound hollow and delusional to my own ears if I am honest. For hope is rarely rooted in denial.

Are we in a state of collective denial then? It’s difficult to say. In most democratic, open societies a free, vibrant media normally serves as a reflection of the sentiment in that society. All shades of opinion are represented in their correct proportion.

Do we pass this test? Any media user will respond to you with an emphatic no. Given that our electronic media is still in its infancy and just about learning to crawl, it isn’t well-placed to withstand the pressures it is subjected to from various players in the country’s power game.

If the pressure was coming from representative political parties alone it would largely be visible to the public but since it is coming from diverse, even clandestine sources, quite often it is the sorry mess that is the output that provides the first hint of that pressure.

Let’s look at the recent visit to India by the prime minister. It is important to view the visit against the backdrop of civil-military frictions over primarily, to my mind, the continued ban on the exit of the former military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf.

By all accounts, key PML-N figures had assured the army high command that once their former chief had been indicted in the high treason case he’d be allowed to ride into the sunset, ie permitted to go abroad on more or less a one-way ticket to spend the rest of his days in political oblivion. That this didn’t happen angered GHQ.

Enter the prime minister’s visit to attend the inauguration of his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi. And how do many independent experts, analysts describe this visit? A slap in the face of Pakistan and its leader; a trap sprung by Modi that Nawaz Sharif walked into, etc etc.

Gen Musharraf may have stood Pakistan’s traditional stance on Kashmir on its head (rightly so in my humble opinion because it was leaving the poor Kashmiris to pay the heaviest price in terms of India’s state oppression and Islamabad’s unrealistically intransigent position) and nobody slammed him.

However, the Indian foreign secretary mentions her country’s concern over terrorism and the non-conclusion of the trial of those accused of the Mumbai massacre in Pakistan, and dozens of voices in the media attack Nawaz Sharif. Why? Because he didn’t abandon his dignity and gave a subtle, nuanced response.

From former ambassadors to two and three stars all seemed to be baying for the prime minister’s blood on prime time TV discussion programmes. This was obviously indicative of unhappiness elsewhere as Sharif hadn’t given anything away to India.

In fact, he talked of picking up the (all-encompassing) thread where the two sides dropped it in 1999. But who cares about facts? Among the retired senior services officers who took part in TV discussions one went to the extent of describing the Mumbai massacre as the handiwork of Indian intelligence.

We may believe what we want to. We are outraged each time India mentions terrorism. Isn’t it time we shook ourselves out of this suicidal state of denial and acknowledged that terrorism is a scourge that is tearing away at not only our innards but also casting a shadow over the future of nearly a billion and a half people in South Asia and that, heaven forbid, could be the trigger for Armageddon in this nuclear region?

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2014