> “We never expected this from President Musharraf’s government”: Madeeha Gauhar

Newsflash: Criticizing burkas is blasphemy.
(says Razia Aziz, a member of our parliament, from the MMA)

Second take: Criticizing something that isn’t even enjoined in the Koran is blasphemy.

The real deal: Criticizing the mullahs’ views on religion and society is blasphemy.

Therefore, a play criticizing the burka was banned by the government.

So far so good (or bad, if you prefer). I have absolutely no trouble understanding this, given the stranglehold of the reactionary mullahs on our society.

I’m also not surprised by the fact that the MMA and other mullahs (be they “moderate” or “extreme”) spear-headed the call for the ban. That’s understandable, given the grave responsibility that rests upon the shoulders of these people: they must protect our morals.

I’m also not surprised by the fact that the government (as represented by the PML-Q in parliament) acquiesced to this demand. After all, if the government can accommodate the Lal Masjid fanatics who openly threaten suicide bombings, why can’t the same government ban a play which ruffles mullah feathers?

This is a state of affairs which angers you, but fails to surprise you. It’s all been done before, hasn’t it?

But Madeeha Gauhar, whose Ajoka Theatre and Media Productions produced the play, is surprised.
Apparently, she never expected this from President Musharraf’s government.

Now I’m generally quite harsh in my criticism of those who I refer to as “deluded do-gooder Liberals”. Justifiably so, in my humble opinion.
But out of respect for Madeeha Gauhar and the work she’s doing at Ajoka, I’ll try and go easy on her. From what I’ve heard of them, they’ve produced some good works of art which expose social and cultural problems. We need more social commentary, we need more criticism, we need more intellectual freedom.

But I cannot help grinning and snorting derisively when I read this disappointed statement. Yes, she is disappointed, and so are many other “secularists” and Liberals who fell for the President’s rhetoric. I can sympathize with them to an extent: they wanted to see change, and they were disappointed by this latest military regime (one of many in our history).

And yet I snort derisively at this disappointment, not because I am a cynic, but because these people are naive. They pinned their hopes on a military ruler, a representative of an institution which has been instrumental in bringing this country to its current sorry state. As an institution, the military has consistently proven to be the greatest threat to our security – be it their jingoistic adventures in starting wars with India which we can never win, or their complete disregard for civilian political institutions when they trampled over an already weak democracy time and again since 1947.

The fact is that we have an intellectually-bankrupt intelligentsia. After failing in the role assigned to it by history (i.e. leading the masses towards democracy and social justice), many members of our intelligentsia were aghast at the rise of the ultra-reactionary religious right. And so, our intelligentsia began grasping for straws. One of those straws was the Musharraf regime.

Sure, he said Attaturk was his hero, and pretended to stand as a bastion against the religious right. And he came up with an excellent catch-phrase to go with the charade: Enlightened Moderation.

A promising start…for the Liberals at any rate.

And then, the harsh reality of military rule hit them, with all the accuracy, abruptness and force of a soldier’s boot.

Pervez Hoodhbhoy tells the story of this betrayal of the Liberals’ love far better than I could…

Examples abound. On 21st April 2000, General Musharraf announced a new administrative procedure for registration of cases under the Blasphemy Law. This law, under which the minimum penalty is death, has frequently been used to harass personal and political opponents. To reduce such occurrences, Musharraf’s modified procedure would have required the local district magistrate’s approval for registration of a blasphemy case. It would have been an improvement, albeit a modest one. But 25 days later – on the 16th of May 2000 – under the watchful glare of the mullahs, Musharraf hastily climbed down: “As it was the unanimous demand of the ulema, mashaikh and the people, therefore, I have decided to do away with the procedural change in the registration of FIR under the Blasphemy Law”.

Another example. In October 2004, as a new system for issuing machine readable passports was being installed, Musharraf’s government declared that henceforth it would not be necessary for passport holders to specify their religion. Expectedly this was denounced by the Islamic parties as a grand conspiracy aimed at secularizing Pakistan and destroying its Islamic character. But even before the mullahs actually took to the streets, the government lost nerve and the volte-face was announced on 24 March, 2005. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said the decision to revive the religion column was made else, “Qadianis and apostates would be able to pose as Muslims and perform pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia”.

But even these climb downs – significant as they are – are less dramatic than the astonishing recent retreat over reforming the Hudood Ordinance, a grotesque imposition of General Zia-ul-Haq’s government unparalleled both for its cruelty and irrationality.

…

President and Chief of Army Staff General Musharraf, and his Citibank Prime Minister, Shuakat Aziz, proposed amending the Hudood Ordinance. They sent a draft for parliamentary discussion in early September, 2006. As expected, it outraged the fundamentalists of the MMA, the main Islamic parliamentary opposition. MMA members tore up copies of the proposed amendments on the floor of the National Assembly and threatened to resign en masse. The government cowered abjectly and withdrew.

Musharraf’s government proved no more enlightened, or more moderate or more resolute and behaved no differently from the more than half a dozen civilian administrations, including two terms of Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister and several ‘technocrat’ regimes. None made a serious effort to confront or reform these laws.

Source: Musharraf’s Coup – Seven Years Later, by Pervez Hoodhbhoy

(The reader would do well to read the whole of this article…its more enlightening than the moderation practiced by our President)

To add to Hoodhbhoy’s list, I could point to the recent acceptance by Chaudhry Shujaat of the all the demands put forward by the Lal Masjid clerics.

If you think the relationship between the mullahs and the current military regime has been restricted to the latter backing down before the demands of the former, you’d be mistaken. There is much more to this relationship: much more accord than rivalry, I would say.

For instance, the very idea of the MMA finding a significant number of seats in the provincial assembly of Balochistan is completely out of this world (assuming that free and fair elections are a part of “this world”). One can only conclude that they were planted there to counter the influence of Baloch nationalists. Who planted them there? The government. What is the government? The military (and its political goons).

So much for enlightened moderation. I’d say a more accurate term would be Enlightened Cooperation.

Hoodhbhoy summarizes the dynamics of this relationship as follows:

In a nutshell: provoke a fight, get the excitement going, let diplomatic missions in Islamabad make their notes and CNN and BBC get their clips – and then beat a retreat. At the end of it all the mullahs would get what they want, but so would the General.

Source: Musharraf’s Coup – Seven Years Later, by Pervez Hoodhbhoy

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The reader must excuse me if I sound like a cynic, for I am certainly not one.

When I criticize the Liberal and “secular” members of our intelligentsia, who unwisely pinned their hopes on President Musharraf’s rhetoric, I’m trying to draw attention to something that we need very urgently in Pakistan: a sober socio-political analysis.

The fact remains that even if our current President were fully sincere in his pretensions to “enlightened moderation” (whatever that may be), he simply cannot implement it. He is merely one individual, and he represents the single most reactionary institution in our country: the military. This institution has more to gain from cooperating with “Islamic extremists” than by combating them.

Remember: it was the military itself, led by General Zia-ul-Haq, which created this menace of fanatic religious extremists during the Afghan Jihad in the 80s.
And as I demonstrated earlier in this piece, there is still much for the military to gain by preserving this horde of Islamists.

A lot of people are deceived by the feeble efforts of the current military regime to fight the Taliban elements in the tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan.
The important point is that these efforts aren’t meant to protect Pakistan or its people. They are more of a show put on for the Americans and other Western backers of the military regime.

There has been a lot of talk about the Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa stand-off. The fact is that if those fanatics are a threat, they are a threat to the progressive, democratic movement of the country.
This is a military regime which talks about bombarding Baloch nationalists with missiles so that “they won’t know what hit them” (in the words of our Enlightened and Moderate President).
Does anyone wonder why this regime would be so tolerant of a few poorly-armed mullahs and mullanis clowning around in the middle of our capital?
The answer is simple: if these extremists are a threat, they are a threat to our society – our working masses and our intelligentsia.
If the Lal Masjid fanatics were a threat to the military regime itself, they would be in Paradise at the moment…with only charred bodies to remind us of their earthly existence.

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The moral, for our dear Liberal do-gooders:

Stop giving out your heart to every soldier who takes over the country.

We need democratic change in this country. We need secularization in this country. I agree. But the secular progressives are going to have to do it themselves. There is no shortcut for this: We have to organize and work towards it, because no general will hand a better Pakistan to us on a platter.

Until we realize this, many more people with good intentions, such as Ms. Madeeha Gauhar, will be disappointed by the Musharraf regime.

How could his government do this to her play? How could he, the architect of Enlightened Moderation do it?

My questions:

How could he not? Why should he not?

This country will move towards democracy, social justice and religious tolerance, if we the progressives do something about it. I’m confident that we the people can change things.

But rest assured that no political Messiah will appear in order to carry out those changes from Islamabad. Change will not come from above.

Even if I’m somehow proven wrong on that, I predict that the Messiah will not be a strongman-in-uniform, and the army will be back where it belongs: on the borders and in the barracks.

And if I’m proven wrong on this too, well…

For a start, I’ll stop referring to our intellectuals as “deluded Liberal do-gooders”.