DAWN - Editorial; November 20, 2007

DAWN - Editorial; November 20, 2007
Going the Gandhian way?


By Murtaza Razvi

WHO ever dreamt of the Gandhian spirit finding a home in Pakistan 60 years after the people of this part of the subcontinent had dismissed it as melodrama by the Hindu Bapu in favour of their Muslim Quaid�s rejection of mixing religion with politics?

Exactly that many years down the road Pakistan is an autocratic Islamic republic and India a democracy not ruled by Hindutva. History has its own way of rebounding.

Today, as thousands of educated Pakistanis resist the red-eyed monster of emergency rule yet again, with all its colonial trappings of state violence unleashed against law-abiding, unarmed civilians, the comparison cannot be lost on a people waylaid on the path to their promised destiny � one of independence from oppressive rule. The generation matured over the past decade marked by media freedom and rejection of obscurantist Islam is ill-equipped to understand the realpolitik associated with successive dictators who have ruled Pakistan since independence.

The Gandhian non-violence associated with the people�s ongoing struggle for the restoration of the rule of law is history in the making. This is a generation that has not seen the cunning antics of Ziaul Haq at the height of the Afghan jihad against Soviet occupation forces there, nor the shrewd maneuvering earlier by Ayub Khan of America, which propped up the two dictators against the then home-grown opposition, with Leftist leanings, in the Cold War years. The fear in Washington, then, of Pakistan falling to communism was as unreal as the threat today of Al Qaeda/ Taliban getting their hands on our nukes.

What brought the Soviet Union down was an erosion from within; what will burst the bubble of the Islamists here will be the lack of public support for their medieval agenda.

Despite the regime�s overstatement of emerging threat from fundamentalists, the fact remains that in a country dotted with millions of mosques and thousands of madressahs, there has only been one Lal Masjid and no more. Why? Because the Lal Masjid was allowed to go to the extreme it went to; a similar strategy has been at work behind what appears to be an Islamist insurgency in Swat now, when in reality it was born of tribal smugglers being subjected to state law.

The MQM�s popularity with the urban middleclass in Karachi and that of the secular PPP, the ANP and a host of nationalist parties elsewhere in the country are natural barriers against any feared advance by Islamists. The latter were able to appropriate only such territories where the state had willingly ceded its authority to them, ostensibly to keep the West in fear of an Islamist advance; and where the state is now seen as fighting America�s proxy war against its own people. The millions inhabiting the rural hinterland ridicule the mullah today just as much as can be found in traditional folklore and even the classics in national languages.

The students agitating for civil liberties on elite-school campuses in our cities, holding placards with pro-democracy slogans written on them and arranging candlelight vigils for those the regime has put behind bars, are truly global citizens. They cherish the same values of personal and collective freedom and their right to know as their counterparts elsewhere in any civilised society. Peaceful hunger strike camps are reminiscent of Gandhi�s braths (fasts) which morally defeated the brute force of the colonial state. That same state backed by its oppressive, arbitrary laws is brought back to life in Pakistan every time emergency rule is imposed.

When peaceful youngsters today see unarmed lawyers, rights activists and politicians being roughened up, humiliated and arrested for demanding what the Constitution guarantees them, they add their voices to the emerging new consciousness against dictatorial rule. The crackdown on those who believe in non-violence as a means to pursue their political ideals and a right to decent life contrasts sharply with the tolerance the regime has shown towards those who have taken up arms against the state, all in the way of God, and to subjugate the people to their own narrow-minded, puritan interpretation of religion.

Something has to give, for never before was this kind of informed, urbane consciousness brought to street protests. These people have not taken the law in their own hands, even though the law, as we knew it before the Nov 3 PCO and the imposition of emergency rule, has been thrown to the wind and the pitch queered for the forthcoming elections.

The protesters do nor carry firearms or even latthis; they intend no harm to public or private property. Many just stand in the street, with their lips taped, not even shouting angry slogans against their tormentors. The state�s furious response to this civilised way of registering protest exposes the gap that exists today between a modern public sensibility and the medievalism inherent in autocratic rule.

Erstwhile government ministers and PML-Q leaders are facilitated by the official machinery to run their election campaigns, while opposition leaders are barred from holding similar rallies. Seeking to restore order out of this state-orchestrated chaos entails living in a fool�s paradise and pretending that all is well, and will end well. The emerging new sensibility among the youth attaining the age of 18 this election year, and wishing to exercise their right to vote, cannot be insulted for long. If the conspiracy is to incite peaceful civilians to violence and then call off elections, because �the country is more important than democracy�, then the people�s resolve to stick to non-violent means of protest so far has damned and doomed that plot.

Will the bearded brigade, acting on cue from their backers and benefactors, now rise up to the occasion and bring violence to street protests? The decision earlier by Benazir Bhutto not to join the APDM, with its heavy rightwing component, was right. The motley crowd that makes up the movement failed miserably to even show up on Sept 10 when Nawaz Sharif was swiftly packed off to Saudi Arabia following his brief transit at Islamabad airport. Secular parties should be looking at the emerging student bodies who, even without a central or a local leadership, are keeping up their peaceful protests for regaining the pre-Nov 3 freedoms.

The biggest disappointment for these young people, like that for the generation before them, is to see America soft-peddle and go along with an anti-democracy, anti-people, regime � one that unashamedly relies on brute force to curb dissent. The closure of independent news channels, the packing up of a judiciary not seen as a partner in perpetuating ill-gotten power, the arbitrary arrests of dissidents and threats of clamping down on the press, are all trappings that hark back to the colonial state.

What remains to be seen is that whereas the pre-independence colonial might began to melt before the high moral stance taken by Gandhi�s non-violent movement � or closer to our time, Nelson Mandela�s similar weapon against the apartheid tyranny � whether the emerging non-violent struggle for civil liberties in Pakistan will have the desired effect on our junta. The process can be delayed and more hardship endured by the people in its course, but in the end, it is the unarmed people who win, and the guns which are confounded.