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Global Demonstration 30th January

Binayak Sen, on christmas eve last year was sentenced to life imprisonment on flimsy evidence (mostly a planted letter, hearsay evidence; find more here) for spreading ‘disaffection’ towards the state. Section 124A of the Indian penal Code mandates an absolute unconditional love for the state. Beware, you may be charged with sedition under Indian law (a section that has outlived the British Raj who introduced it) if you express any feeling that falls an inch short of devoted love and adulation. Critiquing state practices of land grabbing, tribal dispossession, inadequate (read no) rehabilitation, extrajudicial killing, torture and the  curious phenomenon of salwa judum fit the bill of falling out of love with the state. In other words, ‘disaffection’. Notwithstanding what the Father of the Nation boldly proclaimed almost 90 years ago–that sedition was the highest duty of a citizen, not many in the state machinery and corporate media seem to share the same sentiment. Close to a century, colonialism has taken its roots in India. Last year, in  what was an unbelievable show of unbridled love for the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party demanded that Arundhati Roy and others who shared the stage with her in a Seminar in New Delhi on Kashmir, be charged with sedition. Roy famously remarked that Kashmir was never an integral part of India, a sentiment echoed by thousand other Kashmiris. The frenzy that erupted has few parallels in the history of media circus in the country. The net tightens around Roy thundered a channel. Arundhati Roy’s ’seditious’ speech, echoed others.

With Binayak Sen, the media has been kinder. However the witch hunt by the State has filled up the gaps of unkindness not contributed by the media. Shortly after Sen’s sentence, his wife was slammed with an FIR, which was, after insistence by the Union Home Ministry (which in turn acted only after rights groups took up the matter) dropped.

Today, the Free Binayak Sen Campaign has taken the world by storm, demanding the immediate release of Sen and protesting against his unjust sentence. Demonstrations in front of the Indian Consulates in London, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Washington and a growing Facebook campaign prove that the campaign has come here to stay. A hopelessly romantic assertion is– here at the ground of the tireless protests and the long marches, democracy rings the strongest, the values embedded in the Constitution stands the tallest; the chants of ‘free democracy’, ‘we are all binayak sen’, ring sharper than all the media frenzy of hunting down civil liberties and fundamental rights to life and freedom. Egypt, anyone?

For more information:

http://www.freebinayaksen.org/

By Bilal Ibne Rasheed

Mumtaz Qadri's hometown shows its support as he appears in court.

The most shocking thing which has come to light in the aftermath of Salman Taseer’s assassination in Islamabad, Pakistan is the magnitude of support Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin, has garnered among the Pakistani masses. Although 97% of Pakistanis are Muslims, a vast majority of them don’t practice the religion. Most of them don’t adhere to even the basic tenets of Islam: offering namaz five times a day, fasting for thirty days during Ramazan, going for Hajj (if one can afford to), paying zakat (2.5% of one’s wealth). It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to locate a Pakistani who doesn’t want interest on his savings despite the fact that Allah has declared it haraam, and whosoever indulges in it will be considered at war with Him. Practices like back-biting, lying, bribery, and extra-marital sex, though explicitly forbidden by Islam, are fairly common among the Pakistani Muslims. Then there are some eighty million sects and sub-sects of Islam in Pakistan (am I exaggerating?). The only differences between some of the sects/sub-sects pertain to the length of one’s beard, the place on one’s chest where one should hold hands while offering namaz, the portion of ankles (of males, of course) which should remain uncovered at all times, the colour of one’s turban, and countless other things like these. Interestingly, adherents of some of the sects/sub-sects do not consider followers of other sects/sub-sects Muslims and declare them kuffaar (infidels).

So then why and how Mumtaz Qadri, the killer of Salman Taseer, is able to have such a massive and unconditional support across the length and breadth of the Land of the Pure? Soon after the assassination, the Pakistani society found itself split into two opposing factions: one which condemned the killing calling it a cold-blooded murder blackening the name of Islam and Pakistan, and the other which rejoiced the assassination and compared Qadri to Ilm-ud-Din. According to Qadri, Taseer had blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad and he was a gustaakh-e-rasool.

It is important to note that Salman Taseer didn’t blaspheme the Prophet Muhammad. He only criticized the blasphemy law (section 295 of the Pakistan Penal Code) and asked for its revision. To him laws like this would make it difficult for Pakistan to be accepted in the countries with developed markets, thereby, limiting the economic growth in Pakistan. An aspect of Taseer’s personality which largely remained overshadowed by his corporate success, western lifestyle, and political shenanigans was his firm belief in Allah. In fact, he used to wear Ayat-ul-Kursi around his neck for protection. How a vast majority of Pakistanis have equated Taseer’s criticism of the blasphemy law with actual blasphemy is a phenomenon which needs to be looked into more deeply and carefully.

Salman Taseer's son

Samuel P. Huntington writes in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order: ‘We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.’ To me, it is this ideology to which Pakistani Muslims subscribe. It is not who-we-are which  has brought them together, it is who-we-are-not and more importantly whom-we-are-against which is the real cohesive force behind the massive support for Qadri. For a vast majority of Pakistanis, Taseer represented and embodied the imposition of western social values on their society. Photos and videos of Taseer’s son partying with bikini-clad girls and his daughter swimming did rounds for quite a while in the Pakistani cyberspace. These photos and videos painted Taseer (and his family) as utterly westernised, morally corrupt, and extraordinarily debauched – something absolutely contradictory to the Pakistani societal norms. The Pakistani masses resent the structural colonialism and are convinced that their government is dictated by the whims and fancies of the western powers: governments such as the US, and institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. To them Salman Taseer was a representative of the west who tried to westernise them as well. It is this ideology of whom-we-are-against which has united all the factions of Islam from Bralevi, to Deobandi, to Ahl-e-Hadith, to Shias, to you-name-it.

The failure of the state and the absolutely poor governance is also one of the factors in this whom-we-are-against discourse. The Pakistani masses don’t trust their government at all and for good reasons: frequent terrorists attacks, rampant corruption, astronomical inflation, and no social capital.  The politicians and the bureaucrats are busy beefing up their bank accounts and don’t even give a hoot about the condition of the common man. This attitude of the government really frustrates the masses who feel exploited and marginalised by their own representatives. I can assure you the ordinary Pakistanis wouldn’t feel even a tinge of sorrow if any prominent politician or a bureaucrat dies today of natural causes.

With this social milieu in mind, let’s revisit the murder of Taseer. To ordinary Pakistanis, Taseer was a corrupt politician of a corrupt government which is doing nothing except making the lives of the masses more miserable and its own more lavish. For those Pakistanis who were not religiously motivated to support Qadri, it was schadenfreude which convinced them of the righteousness of the assassin: now these rich and the mighty will think twice before hurting the sentiments of the lower cadre; they should know that if they can exploit us, we can kill them. It is the corrupt image of the politicians which stops a considerable majority of Pakistanis to sympathize with Taseer. A personal remark from Taseer, quoted by Tariq Ali, would be in order. When Ali asked Taseer why the latter decided to go into politics, wasn’t being a businessman bad enough, Tasser replied: You’ll never understand. If I’m a politician as well, I can save money because I don’t have to pay myself bribes.

There are some who argue that if Taseer had blasphemed the Prophet he could have been tried in a court according to the blasphemy law. This argument misses the point that the common man doesn’t trust the judicial system of the country – again a failure of the state. The masses think that the rich and the mighty have the power to distort and manipulate laws in their favour.

Another aspect of this phenomenon which has largely remained overlooked is the social class difference between the two opposing factions. Those who support Taseer (a minority) usually belong to the upper and the upper-middle class while those who support Qadri (a majority) belong to the lower and the lower-middle class of the society. The argument that the social pressures, channelled through the religion, have been manipulated and exploited by the religio-political parties for their political gains doesn’t seem implausible.

The language divide, a subset of the social class divide, should also be noted here. Those who supported Taseer, did so mostly in the English speaking section of the Pakistani media while those who supported Qadri, or openly opposed Taseer, did so in the Urdu speaking section. Although an official language, only a small minority of Pakistanis are at home in English.

Like adherents of every other religion, Muslims too practice Islam very selectively: only that part of religion which suits their worldly interests. An important question which needs to be asked at this point is why the masses resort to religion so often in cases like these? To me, it is mainly because of the uncertainty in the society. (Notice the rank of Pakistan according to social capital: 110^th out of 110 countries.) The vacuum created by this uncertainty in the society is filled in by the religion which solaces the common man who is not educated and finds himself unable to model and justify this uncertainty. Religion helps him do this: the situation is bleak because Allah has willed it to be so; it’s our sins which bring calamities on us; we’ve forgotten the Koran and that’s why we are at the mercy of infidels, the hardships of this life will bear fruits in the afterlife.

The liberal section of the Pakistani society argues that the shrinking space for public discourse can only be gained by standing up to religious fanatics. This argument does not acknowledge the importance of economic prosperity and social capital in creating tolerance among the masses. As long as the masses remain impoverished, downtrodden, exploited, and devoid of social capital, Qadris will continue to star.

Last week, one heard about the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s (PTA) decision to impose a partial ban on The Baloch Hal, the first and only online newspaper that tells the story of Balochistan to the rest of Pakistan and the world-at-large. The reason for the ban, according to the PTA, was that The Baloch Hal published ‘anti-Pakistan material’. As expected, this vague claim remains unsubstantiated.
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Ahmed Yusuf writes about the recent assassination of BNP-M Secretary-General Habib Jalib Baloch, and the life of his namesake.

BNP-M Secretary-General Habib Jalib Baloch

Habib Jalib Baloch, the secretary-general of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M), was gunned down on 14 July in Quetta, in what is believed to be a targeted attack. The incident took place in broad daylight, when Baloch was dropping his children off to school en route to work where he was to plead a case before a court of Pakistani law. (more…)

Urooj Zia writes about Pakistan’s recent categorisation as the most porn-hungry country on Google.com

Picture courtesy longislandfilm.com

Google has ranked Pakistan number 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in the world in searches-per-person for certain sex-related content, according to a recent FoxNews report.

One could laugh this off, but what comes next is fairly disturbing. Secret ‘bestial’ passions apparently run high (and deep… and wild) in Pakistan. According to Google, the country has, since 2004, ranked number one in the world for per-person searches for ‘horse sex’. Pakistan has thumbed its nose at the world for per-person searches for ‘donkey sex’ since 2007, and ‘dog sex’ since 2005. One also worries about the citizens, especially women, living in a country which left the rest of the world behind between 2004 and 2009 in its quest for ‘rape pictures’ on the internet. Children are also of interest: between 2004 and 2007, and then again in 2009, users from Pakistan ranked number 1 in the search for ‘child sex’.

One would think that a country where courts went haywire in May this year – and threatened a repeat performance a month later – by banning more than a thousand webpages, including giants such as Facebook and Youtube, for ‘offensive’ and ‘blasphemous’ content, would be more vigilant when it comes to pornography. Not a chance. ‘We have orders only to ban blasphemous content. We’ll deal with pornography if and when we have the orders to do so. We don’t have any such orders yet,’ Khurram Mehran, the public relations officer for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), had said back in May.

In the public space in Pakistan, young couples are harassed by the police and prosecuted under the law even if they hold hands or hug. Small wonder then that hormone-tortured young adults turn to the interwebs. In the wake of the FoxNews report, one can almost imagine the local religiocrats taking to the streets, blaming the internet, Jews, Christians, Hindus, RAW, Mossad, the CIA, and their aunts for the ‘declining morals of our youth’, completely disregarding the fact that the users in question searched for what they did voluntarily. Death to the infidel internet!

In retrospect though, I actually hope the PTA and other random authorities and officials concerned don’t overreact to the news report (which, incidentally, has been picked up and used widely by several Southasian media outlets) and block online pornography in Pakistan. For starters, it would definitely make the lives of women – especially working women – in the country even more miserable. At the moment, twisted minds (and going by what Google has to say, there seem to be quite a few of those in Pakistan) find an outlet for their random fetishes (bestiality!) in free porn which they can watch online or download, complete with viruses, trojans, and other assorted bugs. If their quest for ‘rape pictures’ or ‘child sex’ is suddenly blocked off, one can only imagine the amount of harassment – and worse – that women will be subjected to in the public space. To top it all, it’s not like the courts are very cooperative when it comes to women’s rights – the conviction rate for rape cases in Pakistan is almost negligible; and many incidents aren’t even reported for fear of being stigmatised and ostracised. She ‘asked for it’, after all, didn’t she? So goes the inference, oftentimes.

For the sake of the women of the country, then, if nothing else: Dear PTA, please let porn be. As for the disturbing Google searches, Ass-oholics Anonymous, anyone?

— Urooj Zia is the Assistant Editor (web) at Himal Southasian.