“No religion is higher than humanity.” This was the most often repeated line that Facebook and Twitter users from Pakistan posted on Friday night immediately after news broke out that the country’s beloved humanitarian and philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi had died. I have no doubt that most of them actually knew the full meaning and scope of what Edhi was saying, but I have to admit that I personally did not.
Years ago, Abdul Sattar Edhi gave an interview in which he appeared to be endorsing former president General (r) Pervez Musharraf, which I found extremely hard to get over. In the interview, he said Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari had both made billions by looting public money and that politicians had given Pakistan nothing but poverty and inflation. He said that instead of pulling each other’s legs, Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari should cooperate with Pervez Musharraf in running the country. He said that in the national interest, Pervez Musharraf should be allowed to remain president of the country. Another report said that when Edhi was told there was a petition in the court asking Musharraf to be tried as a traitor, he said that the ruling general was not a traitor.
“He’s a good man and he loves the country,” Edhi said. “If the three of them do not work together, it will push the country further into poverty.”
Let’s just say I wanted to see Musharraf being tried as a traitor and worse and I did not think it was Edhi’s place to say he’s a legitimate ruler or to endorse military rule in any way. The idiocy of youth, right?
But what I didn’t understand and perhaps many others didn’t either was that Edhi lived in a different world than us. To him, politics didn’t matter, rule of law, democracy and constitution — none of it mattered if the humanity was suffering. His was a purer brand of religion — one that saw no prejudice and brooked no hatred. I mean, the man would stand on the side of a road and beg money for the people who were under his care. It does not get purer than this.
He was not a man of grand gestures either. Nor did he do symbolism. He got down to work and he kept working, for decades. No muss, no fuss. That was his superpower. The man drove an ambulance for 48 years and he never drove any other vehicle. He had set up over 375 centres but he never owned a house of his own. He never had more than two pairs of Shalwar Kameez. How incredible is that?
The only thing that was non-negotiable to him was helping those who needed him. “If you see anyone who needs help, it is your duty to bring him to one of our centres, no matter the race, no matter the religion. We have never turned anyone away,” he said in one of his video messages.
“There is a crib outside every Edhi Centre across the country. If you have a child you don’t want, leave them in the crib. No question will be asked of you.”
That is who Edhi was. He never said he won’t judge you like many of the other do-gooders who may think it is as important to not make people feel bad for asking for help as it is to help them. Indeed, he wanted people to take care of their own. He was ready to judge people to the extent that it might persuade them to do good for others even at their own expense. He would say it is a sign of deterioration in society that we have become more educated but also less concerned for each other’s welfare. He criticised the fact that old people are increasingly being accorded less respect which is why they are falling on hard times more often. Even his judgment was a tool he could use to get people to help the less fortunate. But once someone came to him, he would never turn them away. That was his promise.
My next argument, I am pretty certain very few people will like, but to me, that is what ‘no religion higher than humanity means’.
Ahmadis are a highly persecuted minority in Pakistan. They have been declared non-Muslims through a constitutional amendment. They face discrimination at every step and when one or more of them are killed, the general reaction in the society ranges from ‘good’ to ‘when are we killing the rest of them’. There is a thin minority in the country, I suspect, which does not want them to be persecuted but even they have to make sure nobody knows they don’t hate Ahmedis as much as others do. Even while writing this, I have to make sure I say nothing that can be construed as siding with Ahmedis. That is how toxic this issue is in Pakistan.
Indeed, to me, the conversation about Ahmedi rights is a non-starter in Pakistan. It will remain a non-starter for the next 1,000 years. If the Day of Judgment is farther than 1,000 years, then that is how long this issue is a non-starter for in Pakistan. Both the Ahmedi rights and the blasphemy law are lost causes. To all the liberals and humanists in Pakistan who want to accomplish anything of substance, let me just sincerely tell you: Move on; this fight has already been lost. To all the Ahmedis, all five million of them: Leave.
But what do you say to a man who believes no religion is higher than humanity? In 2010, Ahmedi community gave him a humanitarian award and while anyone else in Pakistan would have run away as far as possible as soon as they realised they had picked up a call from the Ahmedis, but that’s not who Edhi was. He received the award and thanked the community because the man was not bound by the prejudices of his society.
“I’m grateful to the Ahmadiyya Jamaat for giving me this award for the sake of humanity,” he said. “It will be used for the welfare of the people… I’m happy that someone makes a bond with me on the basis of humanity. I do not believe in recreation. My work is not a hobby or a pastime. My work is about humanity, and humanity is the most important religion… So many people come here for help, I never ask them what their religion is. I consider everyone a human being.”
Edhi never cared who Pervez Musharraf was or Asif Zardari or Nawaz Sharif or the Ahmedis. On the day that he died, the government and the opposition were bickering over the cost of a Boeing 777 of the PIA that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his family and his ‘camp office’ were to board to come back home after his treatment from a London hospital — a procedure that could easily have been performed at one of the hospitals in the country itself. This was a few months after Pervez Musharraf, after whining to the court for months that he had a severe back pain which could send him into paralysis at any moment, had secured permission to leave the country. Only after he had left did it become apparent that he never needed treatment and probably never had back pain but had wanted to leave the country to avoid facing charges of treason. This was also a month after Edhi himself had declined an offer from Asif Zardari for treatment abroad (coincidentally Zardari himself has been ‘receiving treatment’ for an unspecified disease that can only be cured from abroad, I’m not kidding). Edhi told Zardari at the time he would be treated only at a government hospital in Pakistan. That is who Edhi was, and that is who we mourn today.
This is all your doing!
As expected, the foreign office waited barely a day before claiming victory for India failing to get the Nuclear Supplier Group’s (NSG) membership. Our adorable Foreign Affairs Advisor Sartaj Aziz said last week that “It was Pakistan’s intensive diplomatic lobbying which prevented India from gaining entry into the NSG”.
“Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif personally wrote letters to 17 prime ministers of different countries on the matter,” Aziz told senior journalists at the ministry of foreign affairs in Islamabad. This really was a ‘phew’ moment for most of Pakistanis. Nobody will ever know how close we came to having a nervous breakdown as a nation. Thank God India didn’t get that membership, right? Otherwise what would we have done? Cried like a baby? Possibly. Throw a tantrum that justice is dead and fairness overrated? I can see that. Maybe we’d have gone full-blown nihilistic. Death is the great leveler and it’s coming for us all. Isn’t that right? You stupid-face Indians!
But what if you’re a diehard nuclear pacifist? You know from experience that everything that can be used for a negative purpose, will be. And some that can’t be used for negative purposes, well, we’ll still find a way, won’t we?
First, it goes without saying – and yet, I’m saying it – we don’t actually need much from the NSG. We don’t have a lot of nuclear power plants and the ones we’re building are also coal, LNG and hydropower based. In fact, right at this moment, according to data from the federal government’s Planning and Development Division, we are in the middle of a fast worsening water crisis with the water availability reaching as low as800 m³ for each individual. This is down from 1,299 m³ per capita in 1996-97 and 1,101 m³ per capita in 2004-05. Keep in mind that countries with less than 1,000 m³ of water per capita are considered to be experiencing “water stress”. And now consider the fact that the figure for Pakistan is expected to get as low as 600 m³ per capita by 2025.
So what we desperately need in the country is to increase the storage of water and yet when the current government set out to eliminate load shedding from the country, or die trying, a majority of the projects were either coal or LNG based. In fact, of the 10,400 MW of energy capacity to be added to the system by 2020 as part of the corridor’s fast-tracked ‘early harvest’ projects, most of it will be coal-based. Instead of trying to kill two very evil birds with one stone, and focus on hydropower projects which would increase water storage, in addition to the energy capacity — even though these would take longer to develop — the government instead went with coal and LNG power plants just to have something to show for their five years in office. And can you really find fault with the government for doing so? We’re the ones who’d be skewering the government if they hadn’t achieved the target we set for them, or something resembling that target.
The point is, our needs are different from India’s and as a wise man once said: Lack of water will kill you just as fast as lack of fissionable material for nuclear plants you don’t have, maybe faster.
But even the diehard pacifist knows that things are not so simple. NSG, as we all know, works through consensus, so while India was saying right now that they have no problem if Pakistan gets memberships of the Group too, we all know they’d have found a way to not be okay with it once they got the membership and we didn’t. We know that because we’d have done the exact same thing. Of course, we would, and the reason why is very simple. The kind of animosity there is between India and Pakistan — there is a special word for it, one that can’t be translated to another language. It’s called Kameeni Dushmani. We measure our lives in the slights that we dole out to each other.
There is also an argument — a less convincing one — that if India gets membership of the NSG it would free them to increase their fissile material stocks and thus create more nukes, and conversely, that Pakistan could do the same if it got the membership — stranger things have happened, right? No, not really. So, at least, the Pakistan part is moot.
The reason I believe this argument doesn’t hold water is that if there is ever a situation in which you say to yourself, “Thank God, we have 600 nukes and not 500,” you’re already screwed beyond words.
For now, all the sides have moved on from the NSG debate. China made its call, which was to make India sweat a while longer. An Obama administration official was quoted as saying last week that, after all is said and done, India will become member of the NSG regardless, by year end. “We are confident that we have got a path forward by the end of this year,” an unnamed ‘top Obama administration official’ was quoted as saying last week. Meanwhile, days after India’s failed NSG bid, it went and became member of Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) which sets guidelines to control the production and delivery of missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. This is being described as a countermove by India and the US as China is not part of this group and may want to at some point. Since this is also a group that works through consensus, there is every possibility they might have a quid pro quo arrangement in mind.
Pakistan also moved on, but not before our not-foreign-minister sat us (and by us, I mean top editors and anchorpersons) down and told us what’s what. The media is being extremely unfair, we were told, for criticising the foreign ministry for its ‘perceived failure… to pursue an aggressive diplomatic policy’. It was the successful foreign policy, he told us, which held up India’s NSG bid. And then, just like Jadhav had been the deliverance of the interior ministry and the security forces of the country for all their ‘perceived failures’, NSG, it turned out, was the foreign ministry’s. He told us how it was not just the NSG, the foreign office was racking up achievements left and right. He talked about everything ranging from India and the United States to China and Afghanistan and from Saudi Arabia to Iran and the GCC countries and how the foreign policy regarding all of them was right and proper, but we just couldn’t see it.
He even rejected the assertion that the country needed a fulltime foreign minister saying that in his capacity as advisor, he was already fulfilling all the responsibilities of the foreign minister and so there was no need to have one at all. Just think about it for a second. At some point, he may have realised he was essentially arguing against himself getting the top job. All we can say is, “Well done, sir. You convinced us. You should never become foreign minister.”
So, Sartaj thinks it’s just us, the media, who is bent on painting triumph as trouncing and virtue as villainy; that we are making people see ghosts where there are none. But there is just one small problem with this picture. There was another person, a lot younger and much better looking than Sartaj Aziz of the ‘Damn you, media!’ It was Sartaj Aziz of a week ago, and he did not think everything was so shiny. Not only did that Sartaj Aziz know things were bad, he also knew who was to blame. A story in this newspaper read:
‘”A former Pakistani ambassador is working against his own country in the US,” Aziz said, adding that Pakistan’s diplomatic mission in the US is facing challenges due to the former ambassador’s campaign.’
‘”This person is trying to reverse all our diplomatic efforts in boosting the bilateral ties between Pakistan and the United States,”‘ the story continued, and even said, ‘The PM’s adviser had said without naming Haqqani, “The Foreign Office has serious reservation on the activities of the said person in the US.”‘
So, first, let me just say to Sartaj Aziz of the week after: Man, that other Sartaj Aziz is Karazy, man. Turns out, everything is just fine. That other guy was calling the ex-foreign minister a traitor for nothing. That guy has surely lost his marbles. Thank God you’re around.
But wait, there is another twist in the tale. What a surprise!
On the same day when Sartaj Aziz of the week after was having a tête-à-tête with the newsmen, and telling them how much they sucked, diplomatically, Interior Minister Nisar, another leader of men, was having his own epiphany about the mainstream media and the wonderful role it was playing in the society — seriously, he even thanked the journalists. Instead, Nisar was mad at social media — as if it’s a distinct group or person, rather than the same hodgepodge of people we find in the society, only less afraid of consequences and more into themselves — for demoralising the security forces of the country through their tweets and whatnot. The story was somewhat catchily titled: ‘We’re winning war on terror on the ground but losing it on social media’.
I think I understand what the minister and the not-minister are saying, and it is one and the same thing. The country is doing incredibly wonderful and if it ever seems like it isn’t, it’s the fault of ex-foreign ministers and current turncoats (which is why Sartaj insists he never become one). And it is the fault of mainstream media and of twitter and facebook and of NADRA and Jadhav and Imran Khan’s 2014 sit-in and Hamza Ali Abbasi and Ayyan Ali and Aamir Liaqat and most importantly, it is your fault. And mine. The only ones it is not a fault of is Chaudhry Nisar and Sartaj Aziz and Nawaz Sharif and, of course, Qandeel Baloch. You better believe that!
