Pakistan is not a failed but a derailed state. Growing religious fundamentalism has mutilated its weak democratic polity. And the military has stretched itself to such an extent that it occupies today the space that rightly belongs to the people in a free society. The many-year long US-backed war in Afghanistan and its border areas against the Taliban is not a solution to Pakistans problems but it adds to them. Islamabad is itself mixed up with those forces which strengthen the fundamentalist on one hand and the military on the other.
The assassination of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the dying liberalism which can still be retrieved if the Pakistan liberals were to join hands. But the maulvis have become so strong over the years that civil society is afraid to cooperate with them. It was healthy to see a few groups demonstrating on the streets of Karachi and Lahore to ask for the repeal of blasphemy laws. They were strongly opposed by the late Salmaan Taseer.
The army which has the resources to discipline the extremists is not interested because it uses them to suppress dissent within and carry out militancy without. The more the situation deteriorates in Pakistan the louder is the demand for the army. People in Pakistan have come to depend on the army as the protector against the enemy which means India.
It is true that Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah said after winning Pakistan that the state would have nothing to do with religion. Yet the people fed on the two-nation theory could not reconcile themselves to the formulation that the two communities, Muslims and Hindus in Pakistan were one nation and the Hindus and Muslims in India were another. Nationality on the basis of the country was not acceptable to the Pakistanis. Jinnah did not live long enough to see before his own eyes the demise of the secular thesis he had adumbrated.
Once the Quaid-e-Azam died, his followers said that secularism was irreligious in belief. Islam was their faith and the Koran was their constitution. Religious zealots became the power unto themselves. Tyrants sprouted overnight tyrants whose only claim to authority was their fanatic following.
In the entire 63-year-old history of Pakistan, a democratically elected Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto lasted for only a couple of years. He too placated the fundamentalists by declaring the Ahmedi community non-Muslims. Friday was declared as a weekly holiday in place of Sunday. A monthly stipend was started for the maulvis.
Bhutto thought that the radicals would support him when General Zia-ul Haq staged a coup and dismissed the elected government. Little did Bhutto realise that Zias announcement to make Pakistan an Islamic state would have the maulvis and mullahs rallying behind him. There was no protest even when Bhutto was hanged.
The blasphemy laws were Zias creation. Liberals like Punjab Governor Taseer were in a hopeless minority. When he raised the voice against the imprisonment of a Christian woman under the blasphemy laws, he was expressing a view which the liberals in Pakistan held but dared not speak. The atmosphere had been so vituperative that it should not have surprised anyone when even the clerics were afraid to lead prayers on the funeral of Taseer, not even the cleric at the mosque within the governor house.
A state which was founded to follow secularism in a Muslim state is now the fundamentalist-guided society. Probably, the army can meet the challenge of extremists. But the Pakistanis have a strange alternative; either they lose democracy or liberalism! India can help by befriending Pakistan so that the fundamentalists are not able to play the card of Islamisation to escape the designs of next door neighbour. But India does not understand Pakistan. For New Delhi, there is either black or white, but no grey area.
What bothers me is that the liberal voice is lessening day by day. Even the bravest among them are equivocal. There is no midway position. Either you are a liberal or you are not. And if you are, you have to stand up. Those who see injustice and do not speak out, they lose the right of speaking.
The writer is a senior Indian journalist.
