Where is the civil society in Pakistan ?

In India, civil society is in sharp focus these days, thanks to the septuagenarian charismatic crusader against corruption, Anna Hazare. It is another matter that after the Jantar Mantar victory of Hazare and his associates, which brought the UPA II government on its knees, civil society involved in this crusade has tied itself in knots. The fact remains that civil society has been alive and kicking in India. A valid question to ask in this context is where is civil society headed for in Pakistan? Surprisingly the recent churning in Indian civil society have gone without any impact whatsoever in contiguous Pakistan. Let us examine how and why.

The world has so far been concerned about the radicalisation of Pakistan’s armed forces. What it has ignored, in the process, is a far more dangerous trend that has been sweeping society in Pakistan. Decades of indoctrination and justification of violence as a religious creed have crippled the ‘civil’ element in today’s Pakistani society. In fact, there is hardly anything ‘civil’ left in a society where radical groups, leaders and ideologies are being increasingly embraced.

The brutal slaying of liberal Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and the Minorities Minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, this year, and the widespread jubilation over the killing of Taseer, was a shocking and stark reminder how far down the radical line Pakistani society had slipped since Jinnah manipulated a partition of India in the name of providing a country for Muslims.

In fact, the seed for such a radical society was sown in the very idea of Pakistan itself. The idea of two-nations was not only the most pernicious theory floated by so-called liberal Muslim leaders of undivided India but also deceptive. There were no two nations to begin with which was borne out by the fact that majority of the Muslims opted to live in India and not follow Jinnah. With Jinnah dying in September 1948 and no leader credible or capable of taking over his mantle, the political leadership chose to ride the religious bogey to justify its colossal ineptness to govern. More, the leadership failed to address the common concerns of the people; the more they turned towards religion as a panacea, creating a myth that Islam alone united Pakistan. This myth was busted first in the late 50s when Sunnis rioted against Ahmediyas and forced the State to declare the latter as non-Muslims and then in 1971 when Bengali Muslims chose to go their separate way. No one talks in Pakistan about the millions butchered by the Pakistan Army in erstwhile East Pakistan.

Similar silence hung heavily over Pakistan when Shias were targeted after they dared to challenge the radical Sunni President Zia-ul Haq. Zia wanted to impose Sharia over Pakistan which called upon all non-Sunnis to pay special taxes. To teach them a lesson, Zia created one of the most rabidly anti-Shia groups in Pakistan, Sipah-e-Sahaba which later split to spawn another violent entity called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The civil society merely remained spectators when Shia lawyers and other professionals were picked out by Sunni killers in the streets of Karachi and other Shia dominated areas. The killings of Shias continue to this day in Karachi and other places in Pakistan. No one comes out on the streets to hold banners and burn candles for them.

In August 2006, when Musharraf’s army cornered the veteran Baloch leader, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, his close aides and family members and bombarded them using military jets, Pakistani civil society only let out a sigh of relief and chose not to protest or raise their voice. As the emboldened Army then let loose a reign of terror in Balochistan, raping women, picking up youngsters and brutalising the old, there was hardly a murmur in civil society. No one heard the anguished cries of Baloch people, Pakistanis by birth and belief.

In July 2007, the civil society did not take out rallies or raise banners of protest when over 300 Pashtun students were brutally slayed in a military operation ordered by Musharraf in the heart of Islamabad. A little over a year later, when terrorists from Pakistan killed over a hundred innocent civilians in Mumbai, the only reaction from civil society was a blank denial. Some of the well respected members of civil society went viral on television blaming India for the attack and challenging the very notion that terrorists had come from among them. The denial lasted several days till it was proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the terrorists were Pakistanis, all of them. The same civil society, within days of the attack, began clamouring that India was being obstinate in dropping the peace dialogue unless action was taken against the terrorists responsible for the Mumbai attacks. Today, many members of this civil society feel no remorse in visiting the mosque run by the terror mastermind, Hafiz Saeed. Many of them gather to hear him speak in Lahore every Friday and attend his protest rallies against Raymond Davis or in support of Mumtaz Qadri, the killer of Taseer.

So where is the ‘civil’ society which we can call upon to talk peace and stability? How many in today’s Pakistan are really interested in a better relationship with India? How many are capable and inclined to stop their country’s descent into chaos? Questions like these are not even being debated in Pakistan’s civil society.

Rajeev Sharma is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst and a journalist-author

(The views expressed in the article are that of the author and do not represent the views of the editorial committee or the centre for land warfare studies).