Existential Strife

After these past days of turmoil in a country up to here with trouble and strife that included the highly incendiary statement by the Jamaat-e-Islami chief, to which the party adheres, mark. Even after hearing Secretary General Liaquat Baloch, known in his time as a ‘student’ for various activities, saying the ISPR has no business to make ‘political’ statements and should have instead reported the matter to the Ministry of Defence, I think I’ll go elsewhere for a while and return to this matter.

I refer here to the heart-rending piece in Dawn (Nov. 13’13) “Tragedy of the Bheels” by my friend and one-time editor, the gentle Zubeida Mustafa. Zubeida writes movingly about the desecration of the grave of Bhoro Bheel, a famous folk singer of Badin after he was buried, which is the custom and the culture of Hindus who live in Sindh, and where Hindus and Muslims are buried in the same graveyards.

I have known about the Bheels for years now, my late friend Major Khurshid Ahmad Khan, 12^th Cavalry, in later years after he resigned from the Army, known as Khurshid Qaimkhani, and an academic and prolific writer in Urdu, having written tomes on these gentle and hard-working people who live as close to Mother Earth as possible.

Khrusch, as he was known to his friends, had a few acres of land just outside Tando Allahyar which also had a mango orchard on it. On his small piece of farm, he had given a section of it to the Bheels who worked his land but also worked elsewhere. His own little autak was among the village and many were the nights that we sat on the rooftop in the cool breezes of the Sindhi night hearing Bheels sing their sad songs.

It saddened me no end then, to read Zubeida recount the difficulties the Bheels are facing, what with militant religion slowly creeping (well, galloping actually) southwards into the land of Sufis and Saints revered by Muslims and Hindus alike. In Sindh, there was barely any difference between Muslims and Hindus, many of the Hindu forms of greeting taken on by Muslims too, such as joining the hands in greeting. I have seen on many occasions Hindus sit by the grave of Sufi Saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, hands joined in reverence for hours on end during his ‘Urs’. And when I asked, I was told that Hindus visit the tomb like any Muslim, all year round.

Indeed, the saddest part of the piece I refer to is that for millennia graveyards for Muslims and Hindus were the same, both communities burying their dead in the same area, perhaps separated by a line, by their own religious rites and customs. It is the advent of the hard-right militant Mullah into Sindh, the most secular part of Pakistan, as was Balochistan, where Muslim and Hindu lived in harmony and peace, and mutual respect, that signals great danger for the State of Pakistan.

Let us here recall those great words of the Quaid-e-Azam:  In an address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, Jinnah told about the future of Pakistan as a secular state. He told this in the following words:

You may belong to any religion caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state. “In due course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state”.

And look at what we have done to his vision of Islam: twisted it beyond recognition of even the time that I was growing up in the early fifties. Because it is Muharram, I must once more remind my readers that we were not allowed to play the radio, and when TV arrived, the TV during Muharram. We are here talking about respect for another’s creed or religion and I cannot help but narrate the case of Maya the one very aged Hindu lady left behind in the village of Wah after Partition. A widow with no children, she was given a house in the village by my grandmother and had an allowance of a certain amount of food-grain, clothes and other such.

One day, I got to playing a prank on old Maya Amma, told by servants that she would not allow a Muslim to touch her pail of water as she carried it from the spring-fed little river that flowed on the edge of the village. I hid behind a corner in the path and suddenly jumped out and touched her pail. Maya Amma threw it to the ground and marched straight off to my grandmother to report my mischief.

In the event I got, as we say in the vernacular, two tight slaps and was told in the most severe fashion that worse would follow if I ever did that again. Maya Amma got two brand-new pails in the bargain. This little story is in no way meant to suggest that the divide between Hindus and Muslims extended across the communities: there were vast numbers of Hindu families which were friendly to mine before Partition and I often heard my mother recount the great days our family had spent with Uncle Dev Ram and Aunty Chopra and so on. I can only hope that we Pakistanis can get back what we have lost: tolerance, respect, and love for our minorities.

Which will not happen unless we first win this existential fight we have going on between tolerance and the worst revolt we have had in our lifetimes, made worse by so-called responsible people obfuscating matters and sowing even more confusion than there is now.

Which brings me straight to the JI’s statement that the ISPR should have referred the matter to the Defence Ministry. I can assure Mr Baloch that if any political party anywhere in the world had said what the Jamaat Amir had said, the armed forces would have reacted, e.g., the Pentagon would have, in one of their daily briefings!

Incidentally, I agree with the ‘formulation’ that the PM visited the Martyr’s Memorial at GHQ to pay respect to those who fell in our defence.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 15^th, 2013.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.