The Politicisation of Death

The News, May 18, 2006
The politicisation of death
Kamila Hyat

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor

The small village of Saroke Cheema had never seen a gathering like the one that took place late last week. The occasion was the funeral of Amir Abdur Rehman Cheema, the young student who apparently committed suicide in a German jail, where he was being held on charges of a murderous attack on a newspaper editor.

A crowd of between 50,000 and 200,000 people, most of them linked to the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) or the Jamaatud Dawa (JD) had gathered. The estimate as to numbers varied, depending largely on who was doing the counting, and the extent to which they were willing to believe the figures enthusiastically cited by the religious organisations.

Somewhere, amidst the ugly tussle between clerics from rival groups to lead the funeral prayers, and a stampede that caused dozens of injuries and the slogans chanted against President Pervez Musharraf and the German government, the tragedy of the aimless death of a young man was almost entirely lost.

The scenes at the funeral highlighted the extent to which religion has been politicised in the country and used to serve certain purposes. The event clearly formed a part of the ongoing tussle between some religious groups and President Pervez Musharraf. The government, which accepted Amir's body with 'official honours' as it was flown back, had manoeuvred to avoid any funeral march in Rawalpindi, as the JI had sought. However, the message from official quarters remained mixed, with some ministers at least echoing the rhetoric of religious leaders over the entire, sad affair.

The rows of bearded, seminary students and activists at the funeral, demonstrated that the event had swiftly been seized upon by the two large religious groups engaged in the arrangements to demonstrate their strength and to attack the 'pro-western' policies of the Musharraf regime. Their tactics were almost identical to those seen during the storm arising from the publication of blasphemous cartoons by a Danish newspaper.

While Muslims across the world were deeply offended by the racist and insensitive attack, the protests in other nations did not assume the violent dimensions seen in Lahore, Peshawar and other cities. The fact that religious groups had seized upon the opportunity presented by the cartoons to put forward their own agenda was without a doubt one of the factors responsible for the mayhem.

In an increasingly depoliticised society, with many people on the streets showing little interest in the latest talks between Benazir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif, two leaders now widely tarnished by charges of corruption and wrongdoing, the religious forces, alongside an increasingly politicised military, have filled the political space available within society.

Whereas mainstream, democratic parties have repeatedly been targeted and discouraged, and policies put in place over the past six decades that have led to nurseries of political thought running dry, the religious forces, with their traditional allies, the military, have received a great deal of official patronage. There is evidence that, at least at some levels, this patronage continues today. The result has been an almost grotesque distortion of both religion, and politics.

After all, the question needs to be asked as to why young Amir, a student in Berlin, among the city's sizeable population of almost 200,000 Muslims from across the world, including Turkey, the Arab states and East Asian nations, should have been the one who saw it fit in March this year to walk into the office of 'Die Welt', the newspaper that had re-printed the blasphemous cartoons, brandishing a large knife and threatening to stab its editor. The act, which led to Amir's arrest and confinement in a pre-trial lock-up, brought to an end the educational dreams of his family, which had begun when Amir took up studies in Germany in 2004. In wider terms, it achieved nothing more than a further demonisation of Muslims in the eyes of the world.

The answers lie in Pakistani society – a society that over the past few decades has increasingly been left at the mercy of religious zealots, who have been able to influence the kind of education imparted, the flow of ideas within society and, to a very considerable extent, the kind of political activity seen on the streets.

Over the past five years alone, as activists of mainstream parties have been dragged ruthlessly away by police, and even non-political activists repeatedly, and brutally, barred from gathering, forces linked to religious groups have largely been given a free run – with the most direct evidence of this coming a few months ago, in February, as crazed, stick-wielding men were permitted to rampage through the streets of Lahore.

The chain of events that converted the tragedy of Amir Cheema's death into a major political event is also instructive. There is little suggestion that, immediately after the breaking of the news, Cheema's family had any reason to suspect he had been tortured or treated with deliberate negligence. Social activist Ansar Burney, who visited Germany, seemed convinced the hapless, and obviously confused young man, had committed suicide. The independent, German autopsy board that carried out the post mortem reached the same conclusion.

The political dimension given to the event, the conversion of a disoriented and misguided young man into a martyr, the accusations of maltreatment or even of deliberate murder flashed across newspapers, seem to have come as a result of the swift intervention of the religious parties. Their attempts to capitalise on the death is obviously intended to serve their own political purposes, with the JI having already announced it intends to oust the Musharraf regime by September 2006.

Amir Cheema's death is obviously a tragedy -- as is that of any young person, all the more so when it occurs far from home in an alien, and undeniably hostile, environment. But the even bigger tragedy is the manner in which people, particularly the young, are being deceived by extremist forces and their religious sentiments which are being used to gain political mileage for clerical leaders.

The fact that no mainstream party is, at present, ready to address the true concerns of the people, to adopt an agenda of social justice that would reflect the citizen's deeply felt passion for a more equitable society within which the dangerously widening chasm between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' can be narrowed, contributes to the ease with which religious forces are able to manipulate people.

In time, such trends will lead to still more problems in society, still more tragedies like that of Amir and still greater political and ideological confusion within a nation that is almost desperately seeking direction and future stability.

Email: Kamilahyat@hotmail.com