The grisly, senseless killing of schoolchildren in Peshawar should be a reminder to us in India that mixing of religion with politics is akin to triggering nuclear fusion, which is difficult, even impossible, to control beyond a point. Ultimately, it renders both politics and religion rudderless, devastating society besides.
The killing in Peshawar has been popularly perceived to be the inevitable culmination of nurturing of terror groups to extend the influence of the Pakistani state across its borders, to fight battles it would not or could not wage on its own. It is said that rearing a monster is perilous – it almost always turns around to bite its breeder.
But it is as important to focus on the milieu in which the monster of terror was raised. It could have been weaned on the diet of one of many extant ideologies. In Pakistan, though, the fodder it was fattened on was of extreme religiosity, on an interpretation of Islam that was narrow, exclusivist, angry, and bubbling with hatred. What you breathe in is what you exhale. And what the monster in Pakistan is exhaling today is venomous fury.
A good many mournful citizens in India have taken to social media to point to the inevitability of blood being spilled, rather routinely, in Pakistan. They forget that the nightmarish path Pakistan is on is precisely the one which the Sangh Parivar wants India to take. Our journey to enter the hellhole may have just begun, unless the tragic stories from across the border prompt our politicians, as also us, to revise our travel plans into the future.
Islamisation of law and army
The earliest intimations of where Pakistan was headed came during the prime ministerial tenure of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, often hailed as a democrat, a modern leader. In response to the rioting against the Ahmadiyya sect, just around 5 million of Pakistan’s population, Bhutto did not crack down on the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had perpetrated the violence. Instead, Bhutto amended the Constitution to define Muslim as one who believes in the finality of Prophet Muhammad, that is, he was the last of prophets to be sent to earth. Since the Ahmadiyyas consider the founder of their sect as a messiah, they were officially deemed to be non-Muslim.
There were other important signposts on the road to perdition that Pakistan took. Hoping to legitimise the power he secured through a coup, General Zia-ul-Haq decided to woo the mullahs. They were provided access to the army barracks to preach Islam, and liquor was banned. Zia then issued an ordinance forbidding Ahmadiyyas from calling themselves Muslim or pose as one, even to describe their places of worship as mosque.
Next came the blasphemy law, followed by Hudood ordinances, which targeted women for promoting adherence to Islam. Never mind the fact that it created a bizarre situation in which a woman reporting rape was liable to be tried for adultery in case she could not produce four morally upright male witnesses endorsing her claims. Her punishment: death by stoning.
Differences are fading
In this ambience of morbid Islamisation it was not too difficult to raise an array of militias to wage jihad against the communist USSR, which had invaded and occupied Afghanistan. It would not have been as easy to recruit foot soldiers through the invoking of other competing isms or principles. Once the communists were vanquished, the jihadis were inspired to combat perceived injustices against Muslims in other lands, injustices which were the handiwork of Muslim and non-Muslim regimes alike. The liberators of Afghanistan were on their way to become monsters as we know them today.
Obviously, we in India feel we are remarkably different from them in Pakistan. We have had a continuous democratic tradition of over six decades. Our Army remains in the barracks unless the political regime calls it out. Then there are all those who point to the implausibility of religious consolidation, claiming the factor of caste neutralises such possibilities. We forget that the genie in the bottle can take many forms once out.
There are remarkable similarities between the path we have embarked upon and the one which Pakistan took in the Seventies and Eighties. They amended their Constitution to declare the Ahmadiyyas non-Muslim. We have the Sangh Parivar supremo, Mohan Bhagwat, demanding that Muslims and Christians call themselves Hindu. The Ahmadiyyas cannot call their places of worship mosque. The Sangh has a list of places of worship which it deems were temples once.
Range of similarities
They hunt out those who they accuse of blasphemy and kill dissenters like Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer. We have had books withdrawn, and wish to impose a dress code for women. History books were rewritten during the Zia regime. Much the same is underway in India. They read Arabic, we must learn Sanskrit. They have the Caliphate ideal, we have the grandiose goal of Ram Rajya to seek.
They blame the Americans for all their woes. We blame the Islamic and British rules for our plight today. They promise jihadis a life in Paradise on martyrdom, we claim to have conducted nuclear tests and mastered plastic surgery and cloning in mythological times.
They compel poverty-stricken Hindus to embrace Islam, we have devised a “ghar wapsi” programme which seeks to reconvert the religious minorities. They would not want a square named Bhagat Singh chowk. We want Aligarh Muslim University to celebrate the birth anniversary of a Hindu king who leased land to it, we want to rename Aurangzeb Road and install the bust of Gandhi’s killer, Nathuram Godse.
On the road to hell we may have begun to walk, as Pakistan had done during the Zia years. He actively helped the mullah to turn Pakistan religious. We have the Bharatiya Janata Party defending those insistent on lighting the tinder of hatred.
Obviously, you will say mixing religion with politics is not akin to nuclear fusion, that the consequences it produces can be easily controlled. Didn’t Gandhi invoke religion for mass mobilisation? He sure did that, but in a way remarkably different from what is happening today. Gandhi’s idea of religion was inclusivist, not exclusivist. It was predicated on nonviolence, not violence. It was aimed at reforming Hinduism, however limited by today’s standard, not to take a giant leap backward in time. His was an experiment with truth, not with falsehood.
We are so busy living our realities that only a Pakistani can tell us where we are headed. So here is a poem titled, Naya Bharat, by Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz. This is blogger Sanjiv Bhatt’s rendition in English.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His book The Hour Before Dawn will be published by HarperCollins next week.
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The killing in Peshawar has been popularly perceived to be the inevitable culmination of nurturing of terror groups to extend the influence of the Pakistani state across its borders, to fight battles it would not or could not wage on its own. It is said that rearing a monster is perilous – it almost always turns around to bite its breeder.
But it is as important to focus on the milieu in which the monster of terror was raised. It could have been weaned on the diet of one of many extant ideologies. In Pakistan, though, the fodder it was fattened on was of extreme religiosity, on an interpretation of Islam that was narrow, exclusivist, angry, and bubbling with hatred. What you breathe in is what you exhale. And what the monster in Pakistan is exhaling today is venomous fury.
A good many mournful citizens in India have taken to social media to point to the inevitability of blood being spilled, rather routinely, in Pakistan. They forget that the nightmarish path Pakistan is on is precisely the one which the Sangh Parivar wants India to take. Our journey to enter the hellhole may have just begun, unless the tragic stories from across the border prompt our politicians, as also us, to revise our travel plans into the future.
Islamisation of law and army
The earliest intimations of where Pakistan was headed came during the prime ministerial tenure of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, often hailed as a democrat, a modern leader. In response to the rioting against the Ahmadiyya sect, just around 5 million of Pakistan’s population, Bhutto did not crack down on the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had perpetrated the violence. Instead, Bhutto amended the Constitution to define Muslim as one who believes in the finality of Prophet Muhammad, that is, he was the last of prophets to be sent to earth. Since the Ahmadiyyas consider the founder of their sect as a messiah, they were officially deemed to be non-Muslim.
There were other important signposts on the road to perdition that Pakistan took. Hoping to legitimise the power he secured through a coup, General Zia-ul-Haq decided to woo the mullahs. They were provided access to the army barracks to preach Islam, and liquor was banned. Zia then issued an ordinance forbidding Ahmadiyyas from calling themselves Muslim or pose as one, even to describe their places of worship as mosque.
Next came the blasphemy law, followed by Hudood ordinances, which targeted women for promoting adherence to Islam. Never mind the fact that it created a bizarre situation in which a woman reporting rape was liable to be tried for adultery in case she could not produce four morally upright male witnesses endorsing her claims. Her punishment: death by stoning.
Differences are fading
In this ambience of morbid Islamisation it was not too difficult to raise an array of militias to wage jihad against the communist USSR, which had invaded and occupied Afghanistan. It would not have been as easy to recruit foot soldiers through the invoking of other competing isms or principles. Once the communists were vanquished, the jihadis were inspired to combat perceived injustices against Muslims in other lands, injustices which were the handiwork of Muslim and non-Muslim regimes alike. The liberators of Afghanistan were on their way to become monsters as we know them today.
Obviously, we in India feel we are remarkably different from them in Pakistan. We have had a continuous democratic tradition of over six decades. Our Army remains in the barracks unless the political regime calls it out. Then there are all those who point to the implausibility of religious consolidation, claiming the factor of caste neutralises such possibilities. We forget that the genie in the bottle can take many forms once out.
There are remarkable similarities between the path we have embarked upon and the one which Pakistan took in the Seventies and Eighties. They amended their Constitution to declare the Ahmadiyyas non-Muslim. We have the Sangh Parivar supremo, Mohan Bhagwat, demanding that Muslims and Christians call themselves Hindu. The Ahmadiyyas cannot call their places of worship mosque. The Sangh has a list of places of worship which it deems were temples once.
Range of similarities
They hunt out those who they accuse of blasphemy and kill dissenters like Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer. We have had books withdrawn, and wish to impose a dress code for women. History books were rewritten during the Zia regime. Much the same is underway in India. They read Arabic, we must learn Sanskrit. They have the Caliphate ideal, we have the grandiose goal of Ram Rajya to seek.
They blame the Americans for all their woes. We blame the Islamic and British rules for our plight today. They promise jihadis a life in Paradise on martyrdom, we claim to have conducted nuclear tests and mastered plastic surgery and cloning in mythological times.
They compel poverty-stricken Hindus to embrace Islam, we have devised a “ghar wapsi” programme which seeks to reconvert the religious minorities. They would not want a square named Bhagat Singh chowk. We want Aligarh Muslim University to celebrate the birth anniversary of a Hindu king who leased land to it, we want to rename Aurangzeb Road and install the bust of Gandhi’s killer, Nathuram Godse.
On the road to hell we may have begun to walk, as Pakistan had done during the Zia years. He actively helped the mullah to turn Pakistan religious. We have the Bharatiya Janata Party defending those insistent on lighting the tinder of hatred.
Obviously, you will say mixing religion with politics is not akin to nuclear fusion, that the consequences it produces can be easily controlled. Didn’t Gandhi invoke religion for mass mobilisation? He sure did that, but in a way remarkably different from what is happening today. Gandhi’s idea of religion was inclusivist, not exclusivist. It was predicated on nonviolence, not violence. It was aimed at reforming Hinduism, however limited by today’s standard, not to take a giant leap backward in time. His was an experiment with truth, not with falsehood.
We are so busy living our realities that only a Pakistani can tell us where we are headed. So here is a poem titled, Naya Bharat, by Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz. This is blogger Sanjiv Bhatt’s rendition in English.
So it turned out you were just like us!…
Where were you hiding all this time, buddy?
That stupidity, that ignorance
we wallowed in for a century -
look, it arrived at your shores too!
Many congratulations to you!
Raising the flag of religion,
I guess now you’ll be setting up Hindu Raj?
You too will commence to muddle everything up
You, too, will ravage your beautiful garden.
You, too, will sit and ponder -
I can tell preparations are afoot -
who is [truly] Hindu, who is not.
I guess you’ll be passing fatwas soon!
Here, too, it will become hard to survive.
Here, too, you will sweat and bleed.
You’ll barely make do joylessly.
You will gasp for air like us.
I used to wonder with such deep sorrow.
And now, I laugh at the idea:
it turned out you were just like us!
We weren’t two nations after all!
To hell with education and learning.
Let’s sing the praises of ignorance.
Don’t look at the potholes in your path:
bring back instead the times of yore!
Practice harder till you master
the skill of always walking backwards.
Let not a single thought of the present
break your focus upon the past!
Repeat the same thing over and over -
over and over, say only this:
How glorious was India in the past!
How sublime was India in days gone by!
Then, dear friends, you will arrive
and get to heaven after all.
Yep. We’ve been there for a while now.
Once you are there,
once you’re in the same hell-hole,
keep in touch and tell us how it goes!
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His book The Hour Before Dawn will be published by HarperCollins next week.
