Yet another retreat

Daily Times, August 10, 2006
EDITORIAL: Retreat in the face of extremism?

The ruling PML had a case of cold feet at the National Assembly on Tuesday while trying to pass an amendment to the Hudood Ordinance by a simple majority. Instead it was sent “for further deliberations” to the Standing Committee on Law and Justice. The debate on the controversial ordinance had been won fair and square by those in favour of amending or repealing the Ordinance on the national media, and there should have been no problem getting rid of something that three judicial commissions in succession had found offensive. The women have demanded this since 1980 when it first started demeaning them in the name of religion.

The House also chickened out when presented with The Prevention of Domestic Violence Bill, seeking amendments to the Pakistan Penal Code “rectifying current shortcomings in the law”. MNAs of all political stripes voted to refer this bill to a standing committee and the clerics wanted the Council for Islamic Ideology (CII) to rule on it.

What shocked everyone was the spectacle of the minister for parliamentary affairs, Dr Sher Afgan, declaring that a bill preventing wife-beating was against the Sharia. This then is the crux of the matter. It is not the religious fanatic who is an extremist; it is the commonly perceived moderate and rational person who suffers from this malady in Pakistan. Tragically, politics helps de-intellectualise and postpone an issue — thus burying it. This is a problem that bedevils the life of the common man. Politicians belonging to the ruling party thronged around Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Tuesday and told him that the anti-Hudood bill should be set aside because it was “too dangerous”; some said the bill was all right but that it should wait till the party had won the 2007 general election.

This means that the innocent people of Pakistan can go on suffering under the Hudood till 2007 — and possibly beyond — because our politicians have to win an election on false pretences. They know full well that the police have never listened to the High Court when it has told them not to register Hudood cases against young people marrying by consent; and that it takes seven to eight years for a victim of the Hudood prosecution to be found innocent in our present judicial conditions. Who will guarantee that our politicians, after having postponed the Hudood case now, will try to do something for the good of the people after 2007?

There is no guarantee that our elected leaders will ever tackle an issue that causes suffering to the masses but requires intellectual honesty and some moral courage to resolve. What affects them is raw fear. The threat that emanates from the parallel centres of power in Pakistan is real to them, nothing else matters. If this is the case then how can democracy ever benefit us? Why should the masses vote at all if this is how the politician thinks? In Islamabad it is the ruling party wilting under this fear even when the “correction” of Hudood laws requires a simple majority and there is some cross-party support for it. The matter is different from what happens in the Kuwaiti parliament where the elected men are convinced in their faith that women should have no vote. In our case, it is sheer hypocrisy.

While the MNAs proceed with their antics, the country is undergoing extremism. Large tracts of the national territory are being forced to succumb to Islamic vigilantism because the writ of the state has been lost over the years because of the indecision of the politician. In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), territory as large as a moderate-sized European country has undergone what is called Talibanisation. In Waziristan and the Khyber Agency people have set up their own kangaroo courts to punish populations who were not long ago loyal to Pakistan. People are being executed on the basis of laws made on the spot by clerics filled with angry rejectionism of the state. In the Provincially Administered Tribal Areas (PATA) too the disease of statelessness is being encouraged.

Maulana Fazlullah, a leader of the banned Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), fulminates on his illegal FM radio station in Mingora, asking people to destroy their TV sets. He has money to compensate people who do that. The women of Peshawar have been known to sell their jewellery to give the TNSM Rs 70 million even after the 8,000 warriors it sent to Afghanistan to fight the Americans in 2001 were arrested and sold as slaves by the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The MMA government may be lending a hand in this subversion of the state. In its normally administered cities like Kohat and Hangu too, extremist vigilantism is catching up with the trained bureaucracy. Under the Constitution, no one is allowed to impose choices and threaten punishment to the people except the state.

Are elected leaders aware of what is happening? Do they know that what they fear to address today will become irreversible in the coming days? The Hudood Ordinance has been scrutinised by the Council of Islamic Ideology and the latter has found it defective; so have three judicial commissions. There was a public debate on the issue recently clearly showing a consensus on changing the cruel law. What more do the politicians want? They should know that extremist elements that reject the state of Pakistan in its present constitutional form are rapidly creating conditions on the ground aimed at subverting law and order. We may actually have arrived at a point where it is meaningless to run the national economy simply because the coming order is opposed to it in the name of riba. Repealing the Hudood laws will be our first message to the rejectionist forces that Pakistan is here to stay. Get on with it General Musharraf. *