Javed Hashmi’s brave show of empathy with minorities

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan has cobbled together a dedicated team of media managers. Most of them switched ‘to marketing’ political messages after spending many years in launching consumer products and cultivating lifelong loyalty with their brand names as PR professionals.

Thanks to this path dependency, they focused more on promoting the charismatic side of Imran Khan. The strategy they adopted did produce a massive crowd of youthful supporters equipped with all possible tools of digital communication for Imran Khan. But their passionate presence on social media also made the PTI look more like a cult rather than a political party with doable ideas to govern.

For whatever reason, Imran could not make it to prime minister’s office, but for his party that is hardly the end of the world.  Besides running the government in a volatile but dynamic province, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the PTI also has an impressive presence in the National Assembly. Many youthful persons sit on the NA benches, rubbing shoulders with acclaimed professionals and veteran parliamentarians like Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Javed Hashmi. They have tremendous potential to dominate the discourse in the National Assembly with a carefully crafted script and the ability to execute the same by intelligent coordination.

Of late, many from the diehard fans and ardent admirers of Imran Khan have started to feel disappointed. They just can’t understand why he continues to promote and defend the need of engaging Taliban in negotiations for peace, even after the killing of a major general in Upper Dir and the massacre of Christians in Peshawar.

Imran Khan and his party need to wake up to the reality that their core constituency is primarily made of urbanite middle class. His supporters do not feel good about the US and feel rather annoyed with its arrogant and militaristic policies. Doing so, they do not want to look like political activists mostly identified with our religious-right. They want to appear as ‘liberals.’ Imran Khan will certainly alienate this constituency by behaving like a rigid ‘Taliban Khan.’

Javed Hashmi does appear conscious of the possible blowback: his speech in the National Assembly on Tuesday seemed to confirm his desire to retain the loyalty of the party’s urban liberals.

Legislators use this day to introduce laws in their private capacity but on this Tuesday, they all agreed to abandon that privilege and deliver speeches to express solidarity with Pakistani Christians. Notwithstanding the noble intention, they sounded duplicitous while beating their chests on the House floor.

Javed Hashmi proved an exception by bravely taking on the blasphemy law in a sincere sounding flow of empathy with minorities living in the country. Before coming to the point, though, he proudly reminded the house that even when the anti-blasphemy law was introduced in the early 1990s, he had opposed it despite sheer violation of party discipline. Those days, lest you forget, he had been a front ranking member of the PML-N. After calling it a ‘bad’ law, he firmly asserted that most people in this country abuse this law to settle personal scores. “While in jail I even met devout Muslims serving terms under the same law,” he claimed.

Sitting in the press gallery most reporters were shocked to notice that no one from the crowd of self-styled ‘liberals’ sitting on the PPP and the MQM benches cared to build any momentum in favour of Hashmi’s position during their speeches. Mindlessly indifferent they squandered away a perfect opportunity to revisit the anti-blasphemy law and prepare grounds for its reformation.

Dr Shireen Mazari did not need any tutor to discover that with clear support expressed from the PTI benches, media would prefer to presume as if Hashmi had simply stated “personal reservations” against the blasphemy law in a whimsical fit. Demanding the parliamentary review of this law was not the “PTI policy”.

After a lengthy preamble that also acknowledged the fact that she had attended Convent schools, she profusely praised the Christian community’s contribution in the fields of health and education and finally came to endorse Javed Hashmi’s demand for a dispassionate review of the blasphemy law. In the process, she also admitted that the curriculum taught at our schools for the past many decades has turned most of our youth into mindless bigots. “As a professor of Quaid-e-Azam University,” she admitted with regret, “I have personally witnessed the devastating sides of this curriculum.” I fully affirm her thoughts.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 25^th, 2013.