Until earlier this year, Imran Ali Chishti’s fame was restricted to a small quarter of Nankana Sahib, and the 79 followers on his YouTube channel. Chishti, whose channel features a collection of naat performances with gratuitous doses of echo and reverb, also doubles as a self-proclaimed healer of kidney stones and arthritis. Like many an inadvertent internet influencer, he likely did not anticipate the reach of his first video to go viral.
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As Chishti and a mob of a few hundred followers besieged the Gurdwara of Guru Nanak, the city’s venerated eponym, he bellowed threats against the Sikh community, vowing to have them expelled from the city. The city, in turn, would be rebranded, Ghulaman-e-Mustafa, he proclaimed. All this while several Sikh pilgrims were inside the gurdwara.
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The police eventually dispelled protesters, announcing that all was well; but by then, the video was already occupying pixels across the border. Media houses that had spent the past weeks bending over backwards to lasso Pakistan into the mess created by the CAA and the NRC were manic. Amit Shah smacked lips glazed with vindication. This was exactly why India needed the CAA: “Where are Pakistan’s Sikhs supposed to go?”
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As warfare sprouts progeny, and newer generations swap bombs for bytes and barbs, the rubble of Babri masjid is currency to be hoarded. For India to be able to parry back with the ruins of the Gurdwara would, have been a resounding blow to Project #PositiveImage ™.
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India, too, understands this. It has, for years, played the same game - only, at GMT +5:30. (See e.g. clips of the reformed Butcher of Gujarat sniffing elephant dung with Bear Grylls. In a PR move that would make OJ Simpson blush, the man responsible for over a thousand deaths over the course of a month reluctantly agrees to hold a makeshift spear - but only to hold it - as his upbringing does not allow him to harm anyone.)
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A frantic Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a fantastically unconvincing statement to the effect that it was little more than a storm in a tea cup - a ‘minor incident at a tea stall’. “Attempts to paint this incident as a communal issue are patently motivated”, it assured the world.
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Later details revealed that the incident really did begin over a cup of tea (Chishti’s uncle found a fly in his cup), but none of this made the mob’s chants any less real for the cowering worshippers in the Gurdwara. At the end of the day, the incident was about as much about tea as Rosa Parks’ protest was about the upholstery of her seat.
Eventually, global outrage seemed to click, and Chishti was booked under the non-bailable Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. The Gurdwara remained intact, as did the Pak Franchise of Project #PositiveImage™.
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Fast forward a couple of months. In Delhi, a saffron flag is hoisted above a charred minaret. Modi and Shah continue their patented volte-face act. The Donald-Modi bromance blossoms unfazed: Modi beams as The Donald continues to mispronounce words in one city after the next. A little blood only makes your hands less likely to be shaken when your pockets are empty.
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Back in Pakistan, Imran Khan takes to twitter in a prime-ministerial told-you-so. “As I had predicted in my address to UN GA last yr, once the genie is out of the bottle the bloodshed will get worse.”, he tweets.
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“I want to warn our people that anyone in Pakistan targeting our non-Muslim citizens or their places of worship will be dealt with strictly. Our minorities are equal citizens of this country.”
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The usual fawning ensues. It is welcome stuff from a Prime Minister. There is salvation, there is salivation. But there is also a catch. Between the two sets of tweets, aided by the police, an ‘Ahmadiyya place of worship’ (only half of which is an ‘acceptable’ term) was attacked in Kasur and handed over to a Sunni mob.
Cut to the present. A virus has emerged out of nowhere, swiftly making its way into the lungs and minds of the world. The pedestrian grievances of the past are put, momentarily, on hold. But the Prime Minister has not forgotten about his minorities. He wishes them a happy Easter, before asking them to pray at home. It is a courtesy he does not even extend to his majority.
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As the curve continues to tick upwards, the minorities stay on his mind. It is time to finally give them that Commission. It’s been in limbo for years - the Supreme Court raised its brow six years ago - but suddenly, there is no time to wait. The formalities may be dispensed with: forget Parliament; the Cabinet will do. Everyone’s favourite minority/non-minority is added to the shopping cart, and removed before checkout.
Even with everything else going on, the Prime Minister remembers to tweet against the “fascist Hindutva Supremacist RSS-driven ideology” across the border.
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It’s great to see a Prime Minister with a moral compass. It’s great to see it function when, globally, all instruments of navigation seem to have lost their calibration. It’s just unfortunate that this particular compass points only outwards.
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When Nankana Sahib happened, the Prime Minister tweeted: “A major difference between the condemnable Nankana incident and the ongoing attacks across India on Muslims and other minorities is this: the former is against my vision and will find zero tolerance and protection from the government, including police and judiciary.”
But what, exactly is ‘My vision’? More often than not, it’s the Riyasat-e-Madina. On the eve of the PTI’s 25th Anniversary, it was “Jinnah’s vision for Pakistan as a modern Islamic welfare state.” But even as others around Jinnah made reference to it, the Riyasat-e-Madina is conspicuously absent from his own speeches.
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Over seventy years on, Jinnah’s sepia-tinted Pakistan remains the north star in Pakistan's night sky. But Jinnah’s ‘what-if’ Pakistan, often seems like less of a star and more of a constellation - a celestial Rorcharch test in which some see a suit and others a sherwani; some a shield and others a sword. (Time Magazine, in its 1946 cover story saw the Man with the Angora Cap and the Man with the Monocle).
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For all the deveining of Jinnah’s sepia-tinted Pakistan, at some point we must ask how much it ought to matter. Imran Khan may have inherited Jinnah’s Pakistan, but the past is a foreign country.
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It’s a cruel joke, then, that it shares the flag.
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Today, as one looks at the green and the white, time seems to have decanted the parts from the whole. To look at the parcham-e-sitara-o-hilal today is to see the scar that once cleft the green from the white - a perverse reminder of using a theory of two nations to build one.
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To gaze down from Attock bridge is to see neither the Indus nor the Kabul, but the boundary between them.
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Yes, the India that once decided that all shades of the tricolour were equal must now ask itself why the only colour birthing neologisms is neither green nor white. But we too have questions to answer.
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If Jinnah’s Pakistan is a constellation, Imran Khan’s often seems a whole galaxy - ideas and promises bursting in and out of existence like a billion exploding stars. He, too, has questions to answer.
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But more importantly, if his dream is to be more than delusion, he will also need a plan. Tomorrow’s piece will suggest some things he may wish to consider.
Because while Nankana Sahib may not have been engulfed by flames, this isn’t a race to the bottom. And while Imran may be no Modi, the Naya Pakistan that we were promised deserves to be measured against the ceiling, not the floor.
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Part II
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A best-seller in the pop-up market of coping mechanisms is a type of joke with the punchline, ‘nature is healing itself’. Poking fun at cooped up humans, it introduces various elements of nature that have (re)claimed public space, instead. Protagonists range from penguins waddling in front of the Eiffel Tower to Dolphins doing backflips in the Lahore Canal.
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As nature heals, the latest creature to remind us of its pulse, - more elusive, even, than the recently captured Himalayan lynx - is the National Commission on Minority Rights. You may know it as the body tasked with representing the unrepresented - the defenders of the downtrodden (except that one group that remains hidden beneath the proverbial boot on the throat).
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What you’re less likely to know is that this body hasn’t actually been recently constituted. It’s less, even, like replacing the furniture, than it is like realizing that the lumpy old sofas are now empty.
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It’s hard to blame the Government for this. Even before it slipped into a coma induced by sheer neglect, the Commission made once-a-year cameos with ‘we should really hang out soon’ type smalltalk. As its name was dropped for brownie-points at international fora, it’s heart-rate was never tasked with rising above a languid 60 bpm.
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As the Commission rubs sleep out of puffy eyes, it is reminded that there’s a lot it’s been trying to repress. For one, it’s a creation of the Cabinet. This deprives it of any real legs to stand on. Parliament could be the fairy to it's ‘not-a-real-boy’ dilemma, but creation by statute can only give it legs, not length of stride: minority rights are a provincial subject. Secondly, it’s been placed under the Ministry of Religious Affairs. While religion often seems the only faultline of consequence, there are others.
Promise.
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And then, of course, is the bit that made headlines: that absence during roll-call that gives the impression of a male rugby team deconstructing the female condition.
As the Commission bops in and out of hibernation, the arm that last reached into its hole and held it to the sun was that of Justice Jilani - back in 2014. Yesterday’s piece addressed the need for an honest appraisal of the white on our flag, and . It suggested, also, the importance of a clear path to hold to task a government that meanders, existentially adrift, down none of its own. For this, the Jilani judgment is as good a proposal as any.
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In the days since suo motu 1 of 2014, there is a standard procedure in place: laud the judgment and lament the failure to implement it. Given how few venture beyond rhetoric, Peter Jacob, and the Centre for Social Justice deserve all the more praise for detailing the disappointment in ‘Long Wait for Justice’.
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The overall compliance score is under 25%: the Federal Government received a zero. This, despite directions that a separate bench be tasked with implementation. The bench, in turn created a single-man commission, who in turn has expressed much frustration.
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A quick disclaimer: the judgment was penned in 2014, the report in 2019 - so, much of the blame is to be shared with the previous government. Also, the Federal Government can’t fix everything: the game has rules.
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Remember, though, that this series concerns what Imran Khan calls his vision. To that extent: ‘it is what it is’. If the Prime Minister, too, is irked by such tautologies, he may not want to test his relationship with it’s cousin, ‘que sera sera’ - ‘whatever will be will be’.
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The Minorities Commission, (referred to as a ‘Council’) was one of a list of the Jilani Court’s eight directives. Before that was the creation, by the Federal Government, of a task force to “develop a strategy of religious tolerance” Over half a decade later, no such task force exists, despite its later inclusion in the National Action Plan.
Next, defanging of provincial curricula to remove religious bias - again, largely a failure. A 2016 USCIRF report comparing religious bias in provincial curricula between 2011 and 2016 shows an overall increase of 180% in instances of bias. The criteria for what constitutes bias is debatable, but sifting through the examples leaves quite the aftertaste.
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Fans of the two nation theory shall be delighted to discover that a biological basis been discovered for it - in Sindh, no less, where 7th graders are taught:
“Muslims persistently struggled for 25 years for Hindu-Muslim reconciliation, but it all failed and in this failure there is the role of nature. Nature does not want them to cooperate, as there is nothing common between these two, they should not pursue any collaboration.”
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Taking this a step forwards, it also proclaims that:
“Islam is the only religion which is in line with nature.”
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A textbook in Balochistan - part of a curriculum that actively encourages tighter linkages between religion and the state - unironically proclaims:
“After getting rid of the illegal and ignorant rule of the Church, Europe progressed in the fields of modern/worldly knowledge, political acceptance and the arts.”
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That children not be subjected to systemic racism in classrooms is, of course, a bare minimum expectation. While such nuggets of wisdom abound in subjects from Social Studies to Urdu, there’s no counterbalance. The alternative to Islamiat is ‘Ethics’, not Hinduism; Sikhism; or even some broader ‘World Religions’ course. Even so, most minorities end up having to take Islamiat because the books and teachers are mostly nowhere to be found.
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As the National Curriculum Council now debates a ‘single-standard’ curriculum, it would be great if they’d rethink the standards it seeks to standardise.
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Third, it asked the Federal Government to curb hate speech on social media. Spurred by the National Action Plan, this is one area that has been taken forward, with the passage of the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) listing hate speech. But hate speech comes in different flavours, and while Bytes For All attributes the largest chunk (42%) to the religious kind, there’s no nuance to our compliance measurement. (Interestingly, 42 is also the number of millions of rupees allocated by the Government to defend itself online - again, a different kind of speech.) Despite PECA’s introduction, towards the end of 2018, of the 75 banned outfits in the country, 36 still operate active social media pages.
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Next, it asked that a special police force be established to protect places of worship for minorities. The mobs in Nankana Sahib and Kasur, mentioned in the previous piece, are testament enough to progress here. Generally, too, no compliance has been recorded by the Federal Government. At the provincial level, security plans - though submitted - remain unimplemented.
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Punjab, for example, first threw its hands up saying it did not have the resources to cope, and then attempted to pass compliance costs on to the concerned communities. In 2015, it ordered churches to raise walls; add barbed wire; and hire security guards. Four years later, it sent a reminder threatening to shut the churches down.
A related directive mandated prompt action, and follow-through, when places of worship were threatened. To use the Nankana Sahib incident, again, it took a full seven days before Imran Ali Chishti was reduced to a solemn face behind bars. If any arrests were made in Kasur, they weren't publicised.
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Finally, the judgment addressed enforcement of minority employment quotas. At first glance, this is the only directive to have actually been implemented.
But even provinces that report compliance lack sufficient outcome data and breakdowns as to the nature of employment. This is a sector where, historically, the closest thing to a minority quota has been reservation of sanitation jobs for non-Muslims. As of 2018, 2.8% of Federal Government employees were non-Muslim. 80% were BPS 1-4. Less than 2% were BPS 17-22. The title to a recent New York Times piece, ‘Sewer Cleaners Wanted: Only Christians May Apply’, a tale of ‘death in the gutters’, remains a pithy testament to the truth.
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So here it is, Mr. Prime Minister. It is what it is.
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In bidding us goodbye, Justice Jilani, left us with the following:
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Maana ke iss jahan ko gullistan na kar sakay,
Kaantay tau kuch hata diye guzray thay hum jahan se.
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As the Long Wait grows longer, thorns sprout afresh, Mr. Prime Minister. If you mean what you say, it’s time to bring out the shears.