Purifying Pakistan

‘Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious Minorities’

Farahnaz Ispahani’s new book titled Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious Minorities was recently launched in New Delhi on January 13, 2016, by Observer Research Foundation (ORF).

The launch ceremony was moderated by Mr Ashok Malik, senior fellow at ORF and a journalist with leaning towards BJP, Mani Shankar Ayer, former Indian National Congress Minister, Mr Vevik Katju, ex-Ambassador and Ms Sushaini Haider, leading Indian anchor, journalist for The Hindu. A sizable number of Indian and international analysts, diplomats and retired military personnel graced the occasion.

Mr Ashok Malik highlighted the plight of minorities in Pakistan terming it contrary to the concepts of Pakistan’s founding father Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Indian participants mainly focused on Pakistan’s identity and took the opportunity to opine that most suitable national identity for Pakistan was not Islam but being part of Indian civilisation. Ms Ispahani, who has a journalistic background, has touched some raw nerves in the book and made a bold attempt at presenting the plight of the religious minorities in Pakistan but at times appears to be playing to the gallery.

The author reveals in her book that “Jinnah had chosen a Hindu, Jogendar Nath Mandal, as the country’s first law minister to affirm that secular lawyers and not theologians would run Pakistan’s legal system. But many of his followers could not comprehend this nuanced conception of a state.” She quotes from Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947: “We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens, and equal citizens, of one State. Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.” Unfortunately this basic lesson was ignored by his successors.

The writer challenges the basic ideology of Pakistan stating that to make a nation on the basis of religion is fundamentally wrong. She rightly points out that Pakistan has the most dangerous anti-blasphemy laws in the world which are used to whiplash the minorities in Pakistan. Resultantly, the percentage of minorities in Pakistan has gone down from 23% (on partition) to the present 3%. The author believes that the main target now is Shias and Ahmadis. She however, fails to mention that Ahmadis were declared to be outside the fold of Islam by her own party leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto only to appease the noisy right wingers.

She opines that the recent acts of appeasement by Pakistani PM and the political parties towards Hindus/Christians in merely tokenism. Her angst is at its peak for General Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator, who was the main instigator of the persecution of minorities in Pakistan. She also believes that the Pakistan Army also persecuted Bengalis as a separate ethnic group which was considered more close to the Hindu Bengalis due to similar language and culture. Pakistan created Al Shams and Al Badar groups in erstwhile East Pakistan to target Bengalis. This disclosure needs to be taken with a pinch of salt since the groups mentioned were created to defend the non-Bengalis against assaults by the Mukti Bahini (Bengali guerrilla insurgents). She mentions the instance of Karachi’s synagogue having been demolished in July 1988, reportedly on the direct orders of General Zia-ul-Haq, to make way for a shopping mall.

An extended logic for persecution of minorities in Pakistan presented by Ms Ispahani is the purported use of jihadis for strategic objectives by Pakistan Army with Saudi and US funding. This revelation too needs review since the jihadis were created to combat the Soviets invading Afghanistan. If some remnants have started targeting Shia minorities, it is another matter although it was never the intent. The author attempts to convince her readers that Pakistani leadership is responsible for the hardening of public attitude towards minorities in Pakistan.

Farahnaz mentions the epic example of when Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, physicist Dr Abdus Salam, an Ahmadi, visited the country, his lecture at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad was picketed by Islamic fundamentalists. As The New York Times reported, the protestors’ objections were ‘not directed at Dr Salem’s research but at the religious beliefs of the small community into which he was born.

Asma Jahangir, renowned human rights activist, defines the book as ‘An unnerving tale of how politics empowered bigotry in Pakistan’. She comments that soon after independence, even as Quaid-e-Azam lay dying, political, religious and social leaders proclaimed it an Islamic state, drumming up a national narrative of Islamic victimhood. The result is an ever-intensifying prejudice against religious minorities in an effort to make Pakistan ‘purer’ in ‘Islamic’ terms. Analysing the book, Asma states that Purifying the Land of the Pure is an analysis of the country’s policies towards its religious minority populations, as well as an attempt to set the record straight about why Pakistan was created and where it moved away from Jinnah’s modern pluralist vision to that of a purely Sunni Islamic nation. She concludes that Farahnaz Ispahani brings to the subject an uncommon combination: the rigour of a scholar and the ground-level experience of a parliamentarian. She labels Farahnaz’s latest literary rendition as ‘a crucial addition to the literature on Pakistan’.

The book indeed makes interesting reading and is a showcase of the intolerance that has surrounded decades of political and religious leadership and has driven Pakistan to extremism negating the teachings of the Holy Prophet of Islam as well as the founding father of the nation. The book is a fair assessment of the predicament of the minorities but the dissertation appears incomplete sans viable solutions to ease the minorities’ plight. It would have been very welcome if practical recommendations to resolve this serious issue had also been offered.

Purifying the Land of the Pure comes in the backdrop of Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif’s allegation that Ms Farahnaz Ispahani’s husband, Pakistan’s former Ambassador to USA during President Zardari’s regime, is creating hurdles in the delivery of F-16 fighter aircrafts to Pakistan. Ms Farahnaz’s book being launched under the aegis of ORF, a suspected RAW think tank, does not help matters either.