Freedom to think is perhaps not a freedom in Pakistan
“Enough is enough!” they cried in unison. Holding hands, they formed wall after wall of a marching army, advancing across the broken landscape like Roman infantry. They chanted slogans against those loveless zombies who had long feasted on their souls. Sixty-eight years of vulgar abuse, of being reduced to something no longer recognizable, something diminished – a half-person, you may say. Surely this could spark madness in even the most placid mind; the sort of madness that makes men careless. When one’s concern for life yields to the desire for violent reparation and the spirit rebels against the mind’s tyranny. And it is from there that all darkness descends.
Of course, none of this really ever happened. But this, or some less melodramatic variant of this, is what goes through the minds of many of us when yet another life is hunted down by those who have usurped God’s role in deciding who lives and who dies.
I did not know Sabeen Mehmud personally. But in the wake of the tragedy that took her life, with testimonial upon moving testimonial emerging in cyberspace, it has left with me a curious feeling that even in not knowing her I somehow knew her. We all know that feeling. Because we all recognize ‘good’ where we see it. And in a country that does well to conceal or deny the good, Sabeen certainly made such an undertaking hard. Which is why her loss is such a big one.
Pakistan, you see, is an impressively generous country. Even the most libertarian states in the world could merely aspire to the freedoms that Pakistan affords its free citizens. There aren’t many places where men are allowed to stand by the roadside and relieve their bladders gratuitously in plain view. This just does not happen elsewhere, because to fully appreciate and internalize this level of freedom requires a special kind of insight into libertarian philosophy. Think of any problem under the sun and this Eden of freedom will not disappoint. Pulled over by a cop? Give him some cash. No cash? Give some loose reference of how you’re related to some high ranking officer in the Police department. Don’t know of any best online casino references? Just make one up. At some point you will notice that the Policeman will afford you a smorgasbord of possibilities to wiggle your way out of your mess. This is not an accident. This is by design. This libertarian utopia called Pakistan is quite ahead of its time.
But there is a catch, as there always is. Pakistan becomes less generous – almost fascistic – when it comes to a particular kind of freedom: the freedom to think. Enter this territory and say hello to the Stalinist gulag of the Pakistani state. This again is not an accident. The state, ahead of its time as it is, understands well that allowing people to defecate in a public park, to park in-front of an ambulance, to throw trash in the middle of a busy road, to bribe their way out of a traffic incident, to rape or murder for honor (a perfectly viable proximal cause in Pakistan), these are instances that offer no credible threat to those in power. And to the extent that something doesn’t threaten to disrupt the free-ride of our happy masters, they’ll happily turn away from the most satanic minded of transgressions.
But come the question of free thought and they understand well that it is not benign. Because when thought flies the perch of dogma, the landscape finally becomes clearer. Eyebrows start to go up and questions begin to emerge.
And this is why Sabeen Mehmud like many others before her was dangerous. She was dangerous because she was a bird in flight. And she wanted others to fly with her. Because reality is a funny thing. It’s never a constant, but changes with the perceiver’s own position from where they view it. And nothing, absolutely nothing, poses a more credible threat to the status quo than a shift in perspective. Men, who understand this status quo and benefit from it immensely, will always be the first to extinguish the first flicker of unfettered thought.
Sabeen Mehmud was that flicker. And what’s more, she illuminated many others around her. By opening a space – T2F – for artists, thinkers, and ordinary people to interact and engage freely, she had essentially handed down oxygen masks to people denied of oxygen. And alas, in this lay her greatest undoing. She had broken the deadliest contract. The contract that we Pakistanis had long signed off on: that we will collectively, with callous abandon, loot and pillage every jot or tittle of our land so long as it doesn’t upset the state’s apple cart.
If we want to truly honor Sabeen Mehmud and others like her, people who transacted their lives for a principle they deemed larger than themselves — the freedom to think and express — then let’s honour that principle with the same passion.
Let’s knock down the apple cart. Let us fly with Sabeen.