Committing a mistake is not a mistake but repetition of a mistake is a mistake. The horrible silence adopted by the civil society and intelligentsia against the onslaught of intolerance and terrorism has emboldened the dark forces of terrorism and intolerance to play the game according to their whims and caprice. The Frankenstein monster representing these evil forces has emasculated the entire fabric of the society and has engulfed every enlightened force which tantamount to produce a counter argument to their bigotry and narrow-mindedness. The current brutal murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Federal Minister for Minorities, has again elicited the painful reminiscences of Salmaan Taseers death. The silent tumult by intellectual elites over the horrible death of Salmaan Taseer has no effect upon the crude forces of darkness which have now engulfed another dissident of their crude philosophy. The silence has reached to its acme and has given a free rein to these sinister forces to play un-bridled violence.
Every crime has its own punishment. The common crime committed by these two gentlemen is the expression of their conscience before the nasty designs of these vicious jugglers of intolerance and they get their part of the punishment. Silence is the most serious crime in the current scenario and it has its own punishment.
Experimenting with different philosophies of statecraft has been a recurrent motif in the tumultuous history of Pakistan but owing to the negligence and non serious attitude in implementation process of these policies, the actors on the political theater have converted the land into a hell replete with the fire of obscurantism, unawareness, ignorance, intolerance and chauvinism.
Whatever has been implemented till today has never been thought out and whatever has been thought out has never been implemented. This dissonance between vision and implementation has converted some thinking souls into cynics while the majority has tuned itself to the frequency of the obscurantist.
The present picture in the country is nothing except the fact that the noise of fanatics has besieged the silence of cynics. Who is cynic? To speak is to commit a crime and must be prepared for a ghastly death.
MUHAMMAD SHAFIQ
Lahore
