This is my column from this week in The News on Sunday

March 4, 2007

RIPPLE EFFECT

Fanatics, basant and tourism

By Omar R. Quraishi

If ever there is going to be a contest for a country with the highest number of fanatics per capita, I have a strong feeling that Pakistan will win it hands down. The last few weeks have been particularly bad (or good if one is looking from the point of view of winning this ‘contest’). The country was rocked by several suicide bombings and there was news that many more had been planned by the extremists/fanatics.

Thankfully, and for a change, our police and law-enforcement agencies had reportedly managed to nab several would-be suicide bombers but there were still many who were (and still are) said to be on the loose. All this obviously does not make for a carefree existence but then again who said that living in a country like Pakistan was going to be easy. There is bad (nay terrible) traffic, people with little or no civic sense, and now we have to deal with suicide bombers in our midst.

This is not all. As the days progressed, two other stories came and they drove home the point further (as if that could be done given how intolerant we have become as a society) that Pakistan has far more fanatics than we would like to admit. The first was the tragic murder of a doctor in FATA who had been sent to the region to manage the polio vaccination drive. He was killed by unidentified gunmen and it’s quite probable that this was done because the local population had been manipulated by some local mullahs into believing that vaccinating one’s child was the handiwork of the devil and hence should be avoided at all costs. A week or so later, this poisonous disinformation had reached Swat with a local cleric — and the son-in-law of the chief of the Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi Maulana Sufi Mohammad — reportedly telling the local population to not vaccinate their children when health workers come to their homes as part of the provincial government’s polio eradication drive.

The cleric, who apparently broadcasts his pernicious views without impunity on a makeshift FM station, also is reported to have said the following gems: “I must tell my brothers and sisters that finding a cure (vaccination) for an epidemic before its outbreak is not allowed in Sharia. According to Sharia, one should avoid going to the areas where an epidemic has broken out, but those who do go to such areas and get killed during an outbreak are martyrs.”

One does not know whether to laugh or cry at the presence of such people in our midst. It would be okay — of course relatively speaking — if they confined the import of their absurd and obscurantist views to themselves but the problem is that these purveyors of bigotry, disinformation and hate want everybody else to conform to their warped and skewed interpretation of religion.

And of course, there is this man from Gujranwala, a certain Maulvi Sarwar who killed the Punjab social welfare minister because he apparently disapproved of the way she dressed. The man is said to have, apparently by his own admission, killed several other women as well (one newspaper’s Gujranwala correspondent described them as ‘model girls’ while another called them ‘women of easy virtue’ — so much for the reporting standards of our print media since it seems women are judged even after they have died). Incidentally, Maulvi Sarwar was wanted in several cases and had even been arrested but was released for ‘want of evidence’ — will someone in Punjab’s law-enforcement and legal hierarchy explain why this was allowed to happen?

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Tourism minister Neelofar Bakhtiyar can forget about making Visit Pakistan Year (2007) a success. Luckily modern-day Gujranwala probably does not have much to offer the foreign tourist, unless one’s wish is to visit a polluted industrial city with little tolerance for women in general and the arts and theatre in particular. As for the anti-polio mullah, he is a resident of Swat, otherwise known as Pakistan’s ‘Switzerland’ with its alpine landscape and verdant valleys (of course the fact many of its residents are lorded over by cleric who would have them live in the Dark Ages is something that one does not need to include in the travel brochure).

One can be absolutely sure that there are many Maulvi Sarwars out there, and they can be found especially in the areas that we want the goras to visit. I remember that as long as eight years ago on one of my regular trips to Nathiagali I came across small signboards nailed on trees by a local jihadi outfit saying that women who did not cover their hair deserved to have their hair chopped off at the very least. These were also bolted on the trees along the Ayubia chairlift, so one could read them as one went up the chairlift to the top. If they are still there — which they surely must be — they can now be translated into various foreign languages so that the hundreds of thousands of tourists who are sure to visit Pakistan this year can benefit from reading them.

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Despite many hindrances, Basant thankfully happened this year. The whole debate, one must admit, has religious and cultural overtones and there is no need of getting into that. Just two things though. One: thousands of people die in traffic accidents every year, so do we ban people from buying and driving cars or do we ask them to be more careful. Two: strictly speaking constitutionally, isn’t it parliament’s prerogative to legislate (since it is sovereign and has the power to enact laws) and the judiciary’s to interpret such legislation?

The writer is Op-ed Pages Editor of The News.

Email: omarq@cyber.net.pk