No change in teaching of hate in Pakistan

EDITORIAL: Musharraf and ‘extremist elements’

Addressing a national youth conference organised by the Youth Affairs Ministry in Islamabad on Monday, President Pervez Musharraf accused the religious parties of being backward and having opposed the very idea of Pakistan when the Quaid-i-Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, began his campaign for a separate homeland for the Muslims of India. He even repeated the “kafir-e-azam” comment by Maulana Maududi to make it clear that he was directing his comments to the Jamaat-e-Islami. He also accused the banned militant organisations Jaish-e-Mohammad and Sipah-e-Sahaba of “forcing their ideology upon others”. He admitted that “some” seminaries in Pakistan were involved in inculcating terrorism.

It should also be noted that he asked the confused youth sitting in front of him to “stand up” and “wage jihad” against the extremists (read religious parties) and reject them. “Regressive elements must be rejected by the whole nation, as they will hamper the country’s march to progress,” he said. “Therefore, it is imperative to marginalise such elements to make Pakistan a dynamic and progressive Islamic republic.” He then referred to Kashmir and other issues and pledged that solutions to all would be found with “dignity” and “honour”. The speech was clearly a message to the people of Pakistan (or to some outside Pakistan) about how he felt about the clerical onslaught against his government.

The fact, however, is that the young people sitting in front of him were least equipped to take a stand against the clergy, not least because he had not cleared the decks for them for such an act of intellectual sophistication. His government since 2000 has done little to cleanse the textbooks of indoctrination that favours only the mullah and intensifies foreign and domestic policy options that strengthen the ideology on which the clergy rests its case. When an investigation into the making of textbooks was made public, his ministers literally ran away from the project of cleaning up the hate literature passing as textbooks. A few efforts made to tinker with the syllabi were opposed vehemently by the MMA and the opposition parties, while the liberal element among the opposition kibitzed the spectacle with ill-concealed pleasure. The PMLQ pushed all sorts of panic buttons, and an effort that could have provided a level playing field for President Musharraf’s Monday address never came into being.

The list of things that President Musharraf and his government said they would do but have not is quite long. This may point as much to his current political limitations as to his institutional inbuilt reluctance to say goodbye to the historical military-mullah alliance, but tragically many of his supporters have started doubting his sincerity. It is quite common to hear people say that he is actually in cahoots with the mullahs and such universally execrable measures as the passage of the Hasba Bill in the NWFP assembly were taken with the acquiescence of his intelligence agencies. He and his partners ran away from the “mixed” marathons with the president himself admitting that he and the liberals were in a minority in the midst of a nation of conservatives. So if he had his hopes pinned on the silent majority not linked to the extremism of the few to come out and stand eyeball-to-eyeball against the mullahs, surely he misunderstood the situation.

Extremism is the stronghold of the few against the many. All over the world it is the conservative person who feels intensely and embraces extreme action. On the other hand, the liberal who wants change is tentative and tends to rely on the ability of the state to protect him from the excesses of the extremist. Therefore the state cannot appeal to the liberal and moderate elements to combat the extremists. It is the duty of the state to combat extremism, impose emergency laws if need be to prevent the destruction of the writ of the state and the jurisdiction of the court of law. The situation takes on crisis proportions when the judges become scared of handing down deserved punishment to the extremists and the clergy starts wielding power in parallel to the state.

It is quite clear that Pakistan is internally threatened by extremism. The government is politically hamstrung to take on an increasingly obstreperous MMA because of the view in the military establishment that the mullahs still have a useful role to play in its domestic and geo-strategic strategies. President Musharraf should know that because of the path he chose in 2000 he had to work and share power with the liberal political forces in the country. But he excluded them for personal reasons and pushed himself into a landscape of horrors he can hardly handle. It is another tragedy, of course, that the frustrated liberal elements, once forced into opposition, are now suffering a metamorphosis of their own that is helping the MMA’s aggressive conservatism. *