Navigating A Complex Middle East: New Age Islam's Selection, 12 April 2017
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
12 April 2017
• Navigating A Complex Middle East
By Talat Masood
• IS And Political Shifts In Syria, Iraq
By Mahrukh A Mughal
• The Syria-Pakistan Nexus
By Ammara Farooq Malik
• Towards A World Of Peace, Humanity
By Mahboob A Khwaja
• Road To Damascus
By Mahir Ali
• Intervention Again
By Rafia Zakaria
• Who’s Afraid Of Minorities?
By Zaigham Khan
• Pakistan Needs A Narrative Of Peace And Coexistence
By Zulfiquar Rao
• Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
By Wajid Shamsul Hasan
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Navigating A Complex Middle East
By Talat Masood
April 12, 2017
The appointment of General Raheel Sharif as the chief of 39-nation Islamic military coalition has generated a serious controversy within the country and raised Iranian concerns. Earlier, our parliament had unanimously passed a resolution opposing taking sides in the Saudi-led war against Yemen. And the PTI is against joining the Saudi-led coalition and has advised that Pakistan instead play a conciliatory role between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The government, however, is determined and unlikely to retract especially when it has backing of the military leadership.
Close personal relationship between Nawaz Sharif and the Saudi royalty, stretching a few decades, is another major factor that draws him to lean heavily on Saudi Arabia. Nawaz Sharif probably feels obliged to the Saudis for having rescued him from the clutches of General Pervez Musharraf and granting him asylum. It is another matter that in an ironic twist of history Saudi Arabia played a major role in facilitating General Musharraf’s safe exile and bestowed generously millions of dollars that he could lead a comfortable retirement. This shows in Pakistan how personal and state relations are intertwined or to be more emphatic how personal relations influence state policy and the voice of parliament or institutional decisions carries little weight. Even if the decision is sound and in the interest of the country, doubts will prevail. One of the main reasons is the secrecy that surrounds the government’s decision. Nonetheless, it is necessary to analyse implications of this alliance on the region and in particular on Pakistan.
The alliance is the brainchild of Prince Mohamed bin Salman and is in the formative stage. It is too early to speculate how it would eventually shape up. However, countries as important and carrying international clout like Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia and Malaysia should be able to exercise considerable influence in formulation of the alliance’s policies and its implementation. Saudi Arabia will have to co-opt their views if this alliance has to succeed. There would be no one country’s veto in the alliance.
Moreover, once the aims and organisational structure of the alliance is formulated, and agreed by all parties, then the bigger challenge would be the integration phase. First, it is not necessary that all the member states of the group will be in a position to offer troops. They may have joined to express their solidarity and may confine their role to mere financial and political support. Ultimately, the burden will be on Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and a few others. But if the real mission is to combat terrorism and insurgency then you need a very different force structure to what would require engaging in quelling or taking sides in a civil war. Giving the force carte blanche to engage in short conflicts without a long-term strategy could turn out to be highly detrimental for the region. It is expected that sooner than later a political structure will be created that represents the participating countries to provide political direction and oversight. For now, however, the picture is vague and demands a cautious and well-considered approach.
Allaying Iran’s reservations that border on opposition to the alliance has to be dealt with finesse. This task may not be easy due to the ongoing acute rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The current situation in Syria and Iraq has accentuated hostilities as the two countries are backing opposite camps. A fundamental challenge for Pakistan is the reality that it has deep strategic ties with Saudi Arabia that stood steadfast during Pakistan’s most trying periods. Though this has been equally reciprocated by Pakistan extending maximum military and political support, whenever needed. Pakistani troops played a major role during the siege of Makkah by al Qaeda insurgents in 1979, or while defending the Yemeni-Saudi border to recall a few.
Pakistan, despite its closeness with Saudi Arabia, has been politically correct and balanced when it comes to taking difficult decisions involving Saudi Arabia and Iran. Islamabad clearly stayed away from joining the Saudi-led coalition against Yemen. It did offend the Saudi monarchy but in hindsight even they would have realised that a military adventure in a country as complex as Yemen was akin to getting stuck in a quagmire. Our leadership played again a constructive role when Saudi Arabia executed the renowned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, along with 47 of his followers and relations between Riyadh and Tehran reached a dangerous climax. There was widespread rioting and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia was in a rage. So it is not always that Pakistan has followed what the Saudis (or Iranians) wanted from us. We have been discreet and taken positions that were in the larger interests of Pakistan and the Ummah. Moreover, being a part of any anti-Iranian policy will provide justification for Tehran to get closer to India. Apart from the traditional ties between Iran and Pakistan, it is New Delhi’s deep and widening relations with Washington that has contributed to Tehran widening its options and getting closer to Pakistan. This opportunity should be seized for taking our relations to a higher level and using this clout so that the adversarial camps at least remain less hostile towards each other.
If hostilities continue then the beneficiary would be Da’ish and other radical forces that are already fairly strong in the region. Moreover, opposite camps in the Muslim world have facilitated world powers in exploiting the situation to their advantage. Both Riyadh and Tehran rely on their benefactors US and Russia to leverage their power. As a result, they compromise their sovereignty and suffer from its attendant consequences while big powers pursue their agenda.
Consequently, the region is torn and a victim of persistence violence strengthening the archaic authoritarian structures. It is becoming clearer by the day that unless the region moves towards some form of political legitimacy ancient fault lines and centuries-old rivalries will keep the region in turmoil and its people suffering. For positive change to occur, regional peace is a prerequisite.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/1380970/navigating-complex-middle-east/
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IS And Political Shifts In Syria, Iraq
By Mahrukh A Mughal
April 12, 2017
MORE than 250,000 Syrians have lost their lives in five years of armed conflict, which began with anti-government protests before escalating into a full-scale civil war. The conflict is now more than just a battle between those for against Assad. It acquired sectarian overtones, pitching the country’s Sunni majority against the President’s Shia Alawite sect, and drawn regional and world powers. The rise of the Jihadist group Islamic State (IS) has added a further dimension.
So-called Islamic state capitalized on the chaos and taken control of large swathes of Syria and Iraq, where it proclaimed the creation of a “Caliphate” in June 2014. Its many fighters were involved in a “War within a war” in Syria, battling rebels and rival Jihadists from the Al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra front, as well as government and Kurdish forces. In September 2014, a US-led coalition launched air strike inside Syria in an effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS. Russia began an air campaign targeting “terrorists” in Syria a year later, but opposition activists say its strikes mostly killed western-backed rebels and civilians. In the political arena, opposition groups are also deeply divided with rival alliances battling for supremacy. The most prominent is the national coalition for Syrian revolutionary and opposition forces, backed by several western and Gulf Arab states. Tehran is believed to be spending billions of dollars a year to bolster Assad, providing military advisors and subsidized weapons, as well as lines of credit and oil transfers.
First of all during long and tough country side warfare with Iraqi security forces, mainly newly-formed and US-trained and supplied “Golden division” the terrorist group has lost control of the so called “Sunni triangle” North-west of Baghdad-the provincial capital of Anbar-Ar-Ramadi, the region of Hit and the notorious city of Al-Fallujah. This loss makes it totally impossible for IS to conduct large military operations and raids on a near Baghdad also finally dispelling the group’s plans of general battle for the ancient Middle East city in order to make it “ Caliphates.” On the other hand, the large military operation in northern Syria by Turkey, IS was driven out of the important region of north-eastern Aleppo province.
After nearly five years, millions of people killed and some 12 millions uprooted, President Basharat Al-Assad appears likely to maintain his forces that could not end the war and regain total control. Assad’s strategy to cripple the non-Jihadi opposition that has worked to empower radical Islamist groups like the IS and Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham (formerly the Nusra Front). None Jihadis rebels have been further weakened by the recent defeat in Allepo; they remain fractious and undermined by their state backer’s divergent approaches.
The war against the ISIS is likely to continue, and there is an urgent need to ensure it will not fuel further violence and destabilization. Though IS is defeated militarily or another radical group may well re-emerge unless underlying governance issues are addressed. The group itself grew from a similar failure in Iraq. It is spreading an ideology that is still mobilizing young people across the globe and poses threats well beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria, as recent attacks in Istanbul and Berlin have shown. In Iraq, the fighting against the IS has further undermined the state’s ability to govern, caused enormous destruction, militarized youth and traumatized Iraqi society. It has fragmented Kurdish and Shiite political parties into rival factions and paramilitary forces dependent on regional backers and competing over Iraq’s resources.
To avoid worse, Baghdad and the Kurdistan regional government need support and pressure to rein in paramilitary groups. Success backed by the US support to retake Mosul, if mishandled could turn into failure. Besides regular forces, federal police, local groups are also involved, seeking spoils of victory. Iran and Turkey are also competing for influence by using local proxies. The longer the battle drags on, the more these various groups will exploit opportunities to gain strategic advantage through territorial control, complicating a political settlement. Iraq must establish locally recruited stabilization force along with US support, in areas retaken from the IS to ensure that military gains are not again lost. They will also need to jump-start government involving local, and locally accepted political actors.
Source: pakobserver.net/political-shifts-syria-iraq/
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The Syria-Pakistan Nexus
By Ammara Farooq Malik
April 11, 2017
Social media has changed much of how a Pakistani feels about the war in Syria, especially after the recent chemical gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun that left over 60 people dead. Today seeing images and videos of children either suffocating to death or surviving the conflict thrust upon them, has brought the war into our hearts.
But who is the enemy?
With the constant bombardment of videos of war footage onto our computer screens, we are left with little time to decipher between who is right and who is wrong in this colossal tragedy. The bottom line remains: innocent people are dying and that should be stopped. I am not a supporter of any brutal regime. But the international community is divided over who to support and which modus operandi or propaganda to follow on Syria. Perhaps maintaining a dangerous uncertainty is the goal.
In the ’80s in the Middle East, Syrians were considered a class above the Palestinians (who had to leave their country and take up another country’s citizenship due to the conflict in the region). Despite the fact that the country was by then under the government of Bashar’s father, Hafez al Assad, Syria was considered a prosperous country and its citizens despite limiting constitutional freedoms, were still thriving.
I got the opportunity to meet with some Italian and Iraqi peace activists who worked with Syrian refugees in camps right outside Duhok in northern Iraq in 2014, almost two years into the present Syrian conflict. As academics and social entrepreneurs, my colleague from the US and I were keen to make use of our conference trip there to visit the UN camp and see first-hand some of these people. I had even hoped that I might be able to make some connections and we would be able to continue some work with the refugee women or children upon my return to Pakistan. Unfortunately due to shortage of time, the camp trip could not materialise. Four days after we left, Iraq was invaded by the Islamic State.
Fast forward to 2017 and I came across another opportunity to be introduced to a social entrepreneur from Turkey who is working directly with Syrian refugees in Istanbul. The model is very interesting because the ‘Kiron Open Higher Education’ provides opportunities to Syrian refugees in Istanbul to start university education, despite not having papers and to acquire relevant documents over a span of two years, to later have credits transferred to a partner European university after one to two years. Keeping my history of interest in the region in mind, I jumped at the opportunity to be able to do something with Syrian refugees too. My connection turned out to be an excellent point of contact in Turkey where I see a lot of opportunities for joint work. I am not sure, if we will be able to jointly do any work for Syrian refugees but I see that we have taken a few important and promising steps in that direction.
Sharing videos of children and ‘just praying’ for the people of Syria, will not really help Syria but will certainly fuel more propaganda. As global citizens, we should find ways to work together. Abdus Sattar Edhi, the man who created the ambulance fleet in Pakistan and rose to international recognition as a selfless man and a beacon of hope for many, would have endorsed this. I am reminded of what Edhi Sahib said, ‘I am not concerned with your politics. My job is to pick the bodies caused by your war.’
In this day and age of technology, picking up the dead can also mean, bringing battered souls to life. Perhaps an international social enterprise network will be able to lay the foundations of such work where Pakistanis will actually be able to contribute to the well-being of Syrian refugees.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1379987/syria-pakistan-nexus/
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Towards A World Of Peace, Humanity
By Mahboob A Khwaja
April 12, 2017
THE 21st century global politics is fraught with conflicts, deaths and destruction of human lives, indifference to the vital problem of global warming and climate change and leadership failure to resolve the issues via peaceful dialogue. Those claiming to be the leaders of the masses, discard people’s voices of reason and accountability. Most leaders act in disconnect to the Nature of Things in which we breathe and enjoin life – all fragmented by design or by the emerging crises, the so called leaders have failed to bridge the gap of moral and intellectual decadence and human predictability.
The reason being that global politics is not about the humanity’s mirror of the Nature reflecting ethical or spiritual bonds which are common across the global mankind, and therefore, humanity views the deliberate division as formidable blocks stalling its ideas and ideals for global change, progress and unity of the mankind. One of the major deficient appears to be the missing Reality of global consciousness as seen and observed by the citizenry of the humanity. The global affairs are led by mediocre leaders lacking rational vision and thinking for the unity of mankind but focused on egoistic ambitions of power and politics to dominate societies and people of the globe by means of lies, deceptions, militarization and political hegemonic control over others.
How to find a rational culture of holistic thinking encompassing peaceful dialogue and co-existence in global affairs? The response to this vital question has great deal to do with the thinking, role and policy behaviours of the contemporary political leaders holding positions of power and influence in making the global politics. In this evolutionary conjecture, individualistic thinking and animosity play significant part to determine the leadership attributes and competitive role-play. There are no visible characteristics of moral and intellectual traits which govern the global political affairs. Do most of the powerful leaders possess formidable mental microscope to scan the experiential observations for making favorable policies and practices in international affairs? Global humanity looks for rational attitudes and realistic rethinking to deal with sensitive issues of humanitarian concerns. While Europeans and the US have imposed economic embargo and cultural boycott of Russia, it has no meaningful impact except evolution of more discards and animosity when human communication is deliberately neglected. The similar problems of imbued animosity and hatred persist across the Middle East. Foreign interventions and killing machines are destroying the ancient lands of human culture and civilizations.
To destroy the Arab people, they are collaborating in military interventions. Wars suck out positive human thinking and creative energies to articulate a sustainable human future. Arab leaders are entangled willfully in catastrophic and bloody sectarian warfare. They have consciously put on hold the focal issue of the Middle East -that is, Palestine and normalization of relations with the State of Israel. They appear to have lost the sense of strategic and moral direction to restore normalcy in thinking and policy behavior. Leaders of America, Europe and Russia need to rethink, how they could facilitate a peaceful ending of the sectarian cruelty rather than taking sides and bombing the innocent civilians and causing destruction of the human habitats. How should the global humanity view the contemporary Arab societies, their war-torn bloody cultures operated by foreign mercenaries and few egoistic authoritarian leaders?
Every day is a killing day in Syria, Iraq, Egypt,Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. What kind of message of civility, moral and intellectual values do they convey to the watchful eyes of the global observers? Leadership is an art, it can be improved if leaders are open to listening, flexible and adaptable to the challenging facts of human affairs and have passion for facts, not fantasy. The informed and spirited global humanity could help the entrenched leaders to make a navigational change for global peace and One Humanity.
http://pakobserver.net/towards-world-peace-humanity/
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Road to Damascus
By Mahir Ali
April 12th, 2017
REX Tillerson’s conversations in Moscow today will be extremely interesting, to put it mildly. The US secretary of state, the recipient five years ago of an Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin, is unlikely to come across many friendly faces in the Russian capital.
What some people saw as the solitary potential upside of a Trump presidency, namely the likelihood of less fraught relations between Washington and Moscow, was upended in the wake of last week’s US missile strike on a Syrian airbase, theoretically in retaliation for a bombing raid by the regime of Bashar al-Assad in which the chemical weapon sarin was deployed.
Neither Syria nor Russia has denied that a chemical weapon was indeed the culprit in the upwards of 80 horrendous deaths at Khan Sheikhun in Idlib province, but both claim it was the consequence of bombs falling on rebel stockpiles of the deadly substance. That’s unlikely, although not implausible.
The alternative explanation would be the deliberate use of sarin by the Syrian air force, and at least some of the scepticism about that particular scenario derives not from the profound cruelty of the act — the Syrian regime’s capacity for brutality is well established — but from its extreme stupidity.
Is it acceptable to slay civilians, including ‘beautiful children’?
After all, Syria was supposed to have surrendered all its stockpiles of chemical weapons following a Russian-brokered agreement almost four years ago. Ever since, Barack Obama has been regularly excoriated by some for not retaliating when the Syrian government crossed a ‘red line’ he had rhetorically instituted through the ostensible use of chemical weapons on a rebel-held area on the outskirts of Damascus.
One of the reasons the Obama administration was so keen to go along with the alternative proposed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, though, was that an implacably hostile US Congress would almost certainly have rejected any proposal for military action in Syria, just as the British parliament had done.
Back then, Donald Trump’s tweets were imploring the president to stay out of Syria. What’s more, until a couple of weeks ago representatives of the Trump administration were implying that Assad wasn’t the primary problem, and that all efforts must be focused on defeating the militant Islamic State group and other jihadists.
The Tomahawking of the Syrian air force indirectly rewards those very forces, just as the US-Saudi actions in Yemen tend to do. It’s hardly any surprise that Riyadh and Tel Aviv are again on precisely the same page in hailing Trump’s initiative, perhaps even more vociferously than liberal and conservative hawks in the West. It’s as if precipitate military action is all it takes for a widely scorned White House incumbent to suddenly appear presidential.
Trump’s Pauline conversion on the (at least metaphorical) road to Damascus was apparently prompted by the ubiquitous images of “beautiful children” struggling to survive the chemical overload. The images are indeed heartrending, even in a world accustomed to such atrocities. As several commentators have pointed out, though, isn’t Trump at the same time striving to exclude equally beautiful children from entry into his nation?
Besides, is it acceptable to slay civilians, inevitably including beautiful children, with barrel bombs and other weaponry that excludes chemical weapons? And who can say precisely how many beautiful children have perished in the Middle East in the past couple of decades as a consequence of US actions or those of its allies? Remember how Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright said that the deaths of an estimated half a million children in Iraq were an acceptable price to pay for sanctions against Iraq?
It was 50 years ago this month that Martin Luther King Jr definitively broke his silence on Vietnam by eloquently condemning his nation’s government as the worst perpetrator of violence in the world. Not enough has changed in the interim.
It cannot be denied that US action in Syria helped to detract attention from Trumps multiple domestic dilemmas. That too is a fairly typical American pattern.
The sharply deteriorated ties with Russia ought to be a key concern, though. Not to mention the Trump summit with China’s president Xi Jinping at the US president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which was overshadowed by the military action.
Far from the Middle East, meanwhile, there’s the question of North Korea, in which context the cliché of ‘all options are on the table’ has lately been echoing, amid assertions that the US is willing to go it alone, as if the most powerful nation in the world — which has lately given notice of its intent to sharply increase its military budget — needs assistance in operating a fly-swatter.
The assumption that Trump would be a relatively isolationist president has been comprehensively thwarted. Unfortunately, the suspicion that he is stupidly susceptible to dodgy advice from a range of dubious —in some cases deranged — advisers remains intact.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1326465/road-to-damascus
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Intervention Again
By Rafia Zakaria
April 12th, 2017
THE obituary for liberalism was perhaps prematurely written and published. A few months ago, when Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States and announced his policy of ‘America First’ from his oath-taking pulpit, many mourned.
The premises which hold that states are moral creatures and that the purpose of the US is to spread the values of liberal democracy across the world seemed weaker than ever. They floundered further still in the months following as America itself, or rather America under Donald Trump, seemed uncommitted to liberalism itself, seeming to prefer a sort of direct democracy that would enable a strongman ruler who appointed his family to plum posts and ruled largely via executive orders that did not require legislative approval.
If not dead, liberalism seemed precipitously in decline, America looking increasingly inward, the world left to its own authoritarian futures. Trump wasn’t interested in the world, let alone policing the world; within weeks he had spurned the handshakes of America’s liberal allies and promised his supporters to uphold nationalism over liberalism. He thumbed his nose at Nato allies, promised he would drastically cut US diplomatic and aid programmes and hack off enormous portions of the UN budget provided by the US.
Then came last week. Following yet another grotesque chemical attack in Syria, this time in Idlib province, the conscience of the US, or rather its cable news-ravenous president, seemed suddenly moved. As many commentators who have been watching the devastation in Syria have noted, horrific chemical attacks have happened before, taking the lives of scores of innocent men, women and children. Many of the earlier ones have also deployed nerve agents, and enabled the sort of tableau of carnage that makes humans look worse than the most selfish beasts, and humanity as being utterly and completely dead. In sum, this new attack was not different in technique than those that have come before, those that have produced pictures, videos and pleas for help, all of them disregarded.
For many pro-intervention liberals, being the president of the US means being the president of the world.
This one was different, however, in timing. It came at an hour when the new American president found himself increasingly beleaguered, several of his promises left to flounder. Trump’s failure, along with Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, to get Congress to pass the healthcare reform bill was damning, given that both the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by his party. The travel bans that had made so many thousands of his supporters giddy with joy in their hatred of refugees and immigrants, were blocked by judges who saw them as openly and clearly discriminatory.
If all that were not enough, there was the matter of Russia, or rather the Trump administration officials who were the focus of congressional investigations into Russia’s alleged meddling in the US elections. Trump likes to win, and he was losing; midweek he removed his favored adviser, Stephen Bannon, from the National Security Council. Just a bit later, he decided to bomb Syria. Syrian children, the very children whom he had twice tried to ban from entering the US, via the infamous travel bans, now deserved avenging, and America, the same America that had sworn off putting other countries first, would be the one to do it.
Liberal hawks who had been languishing in their funeral caskets during the dismal, less-than-100-day-old Trump presidency, rose from the dead. America, that policeman of the world, was not dead after all. It had merely been in hibernation, momentarily dormant until a new president discovered why defining American interest as world interest and state action as moral action, was such a delectable morsel. The day after the air strikes, a resounding barrage of editorials in American newspapers celebrated the action taken by the otherwise reviled Donald Trump. At least one noted CNN commentator, Fareed Zakaria, a fan of the bombing, declared it as being the moment that Trump had truly become president of the United States.
It is clear from the continuing hubbub, which has commenced apace even as little else is known about Trump’s plans for Syria, or even if he has any further plans for Syria at all, that for many pro-intervention liberals, being the president of the US means being the president of the world.
Trump has at least for now embraced this, perhaps because he has also just realised the political efficacy of the insistence that all American actions are morally right actions. As Afghans and Pakistanis can testify, American intervention creates far more problems than it solves. The hapless Syrians, suffering as long as they have, may cheer in their desperation but they cannot with any confidence claim that America will solve the internecine and multidimensional conflict raging in their country and that has in many ways spilled over into adjoining states.
Long-term solutions must be sustainable; exogenous influences can never produce sustainable stability. None of this is truer than in situations in which extremist groups —in the Syrian instance, the ferociously violent Islamic State group — are a component. As was seen in Afghanistan and Pakistan, local extremist organisations only gain strength when anti-imperialist propaganda is whetted by American intervention. So too, will be the case in Syria.
Trump probably does not care about any of this. Nor do the liberals who unerringly salivate at the prospect of war to spread their version of what is good and right for all. Far more likely is the simpler and more pedestrian explanation: Syria has been a timely distraction for a man struggling to stabilise his administration. The drums of war (or perhaps the launch of missiles) automatically convert even village idiots into heroes, and while Donald Trump may not have wanted war, he wants very much to be a hero.
Source: dawn.com/news/1326467/intervention-again
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Who’s Afraid Of Minorities?
By Zaigham Khan
April 10, 2017
Although India may be shining upon its middle class and Hindu nationalists, a Kali Yuga – the mythical Dark Age – is descending on Muslims and other religious minorities in the country.
The discrimination against them has been gradually institutionalised and turned into a national creed. At a time when India should be self-assured, confident and at peace with itself and its neighbours, it is showing increasing signs of a deep-seated inferiority complex.
Interestingly, this is happening at a time when the much-maligned Pakistan is making an effort to integrate its religious minorities and become more inclusive. Its provincial legislatures are passing law after law to protect minorities. Its courts are interpreting laws in a minority-friendly manner, forcing the authorities to protect and reconstruct minorities’ places of worship. Its political leaders are participating in the religious festivals of minorities and making statements that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
It appears that Hindu nationalists have finally won – or, are on the brink of winning – the battle for the soul of India, defeating the ghost of Gandhi whom they had assassinated 69 years ago. In the words of Christophe Jaffrelot: “Mahatma Gandhi looked at the Indian nation as, ideally, a harmonious collection of religious communities all placed on an equal footing. He promoted a syncretic and spiritual brand of the Hindu religion in which all creeds were bound to merge, or converge. Even though the leaders of India’s minorities – especially Muslims – resisted this universalist appeal – in part because Gandhi articulated his views in a thoroughly Hindu style”.
The ideology of Hindu nationalism, on the other hand, equated India’s national identity with Hinduism. According to their worldview: “Indian culture was to be defined as Hindu culture, and the minorities were to be assimilated by their paying allegiance to the symbols and mainstays of the majority as those of the nation”. The fear of Hindu nationalism becoming ascendant in India was a major part of the Muslim League’s narrative, first for its struggle to ensure the constitutional protection of Muslims and, after failing to obtain such guarantees, for a separate homeland in Muslim-majority areas.
If Gandhi was such a staunch Hindu and many of his followers considered him a deity, what was his problem with Hindu nationalists? For Gandhi, Hinduism was a moral and spiritual system while Hindu nationalists believe Hinduism is a tribe that has the right to enjoy complete supremacy in India because of its history and its numbers. When a religion is separated from its spiritual essence and used to mark a tribal identity, it turns into a dark force. This is what we are witnessing in India and many other places in the world today.
According to Carl Jung, all humans and social groups have a dark side to them. We suppress these dark energies to remain human. But at times, they overpower us and make us do things we might have considered unimaginable. Both India and Pakistan have reasons to be afraid of their own shadows. While the British exited after three centuries in India without firing a single shot, the two countries underwent a bloodbath and mass exodus of Hindus from Pakistan and Muslims from India. The ethnic cleansing and atrocities happened at such a large scale and with such ferocity that in modern history, the episode can only be compared with the Holocaust.
As part of the project to build nation-states, the two countries have developed two different – and diametrically opposed – myths of origin. As Ashis Nandy, India’s most celebrated sociologist, writes: “This story is not concerned with history; it is concerned with the future of ‘reconstructed’ pasts, with the myths that frame the fate of South Asia as it enters the twenty-first century. It is actually a story which has many of the ingredients that constitute an epic – a cast of millions, memories of wars and an exodus that have taken the toll of someone near to virtually everyone, and anger over lost or stolen patrimonies”.
Two sets of people have paid an enormous price for the hostility between the two states – those who left and those who were left behind, ie the migrants and the minorities. In India, those who left for Pakistan or were forced to migrate, are termed as enemies by Indian law (under the Enemy Property Act 1968) and their properties cannot be inherited by their children who opted to stay.
Hundreds and thousands of peoples who crossed the borders in 1947 were not allowed to return to collect their belongings or revisit their homes or cities. Those who migrated as infants or children are now in their seventies and eighties. But these senior citizens have also been denied their last chance to revisit their places of birth. The two mighty nuclear powers feel threatened by this generation because they can threaten national myths.
There is no place for Muslims in the history of India, which has been constructed by Hindu nationalists. They are bound to remain aliens and outsiders unless they are willing for ghar wapsi, that is returning to their original faith – Hinduism.
As Shoaib Daniyal, an Indian journalist, notes: “Most worryingly, Akbar has been a political untouchable since 1947. India has no roads, roundabouts, airports or museums named after Akbar; no equestrian statues of a man who was the most powerful sovereign in the world during his time. (The Akbar Road at the centre of this debate is a name bestowed by the British)”.
According to Daniyal, Maharana Pratap, on the other hand, is remembered through the airports, bus terminals and roads named after him while the equestrian statues of Pratap abound across India, with one even making it to parliament. This is despite the fact that he was the ruler of a tiny principality and was rather easily defeated by Akbar.
Seven decades after Independence, Muslims are still viewed with suspicion in India and Hindus in Pakistan. In India, Muslims are bearing the full brunt of the rising tide of Hindu nationalism and are under attack from vigilante cow protectors (Gau Rakhshaks) who lynch and even murder them – and, sometimes, low-caste Hindus – on suspicion of smuggling cows or consuming their meat. The socio-economic status of Muslims paints a bleak picture and hint at the structural injustice and exclusion.
Pakistan hardly has anything better to report. According to an international index, Pakistan is the eighth most dangerous country for minorities. The state’s discriminatory policies have permeated into all spheres of society, exacerbating the already existing forms of exclusion and making members of minority communities fear their neighbours. While terrorism has affected all Pakistanis, it has disproportionally ravaged the lives of minorities who were already under attack from religious extremists. Terrorists have attacked their properties, religious congregations, places of worship and community leaders, forcing thousands of people to leave their homes and relocate to safer places.
However, now Pakistan appears inclined to tread a different path. A newfound optimism is evident among minority communities and rights activists. My recent interaction with young people belonging to minority groups showed that they see a bright future for themselves in this country. They feel that Muslims not only stand with them but are at the vanguards of their struggle for rights.
If India had won its freedom for its people and Pakistan was created to ensure social justice, there should be no place for discrimination on their lands.
Source; thenews.com.pk/print/197651-Whos-afraid-of-minorities
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Pakistan Needs A Narrative Of Peace And Coexistence
By Zulfiquar Rao
12-Apr-17
Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad is the tenth joint military operation against religious insurgents across Pakistan since 2007. All these operations and sacrifices of our forces and civilians have indeed helped in significantly weeding out terrorist outfits on the ground, yet Pakistan has suffered intermittently from spectacular terrorist attacks, such as at Army Public School Peshawar and recently at Sufi shrines in Balochistan and Sindh.
Certainly, the menace of sectarian and religiously motivated terrorism won't end with just sweat and blood from our law enforcement agencies. These terrorists that our forces have to fight out physically have adopted a particular set of beliefs that convinces them to wage a war against not only innocent civilians but also the state as they find the very concept of nation-state heretic.
Of course, it's then that particular religious interpretation and narrative produces jingoistic champions who believe in this narrative intensely enough to massacre others on the basis of their skewed beliefs. So, weeding out these groups through successful military action has provided us with only a symptomatic relief.
It was interesting to see Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif recently urging religious scholars to present a counter-narrative against extremist and violent religious beliefs so that the dream of eternal peace can be realised. Now, in a nation-state that Pakistan is, albeit with multiple ethnicities, the state has to take the lead in formulating a narrative. Didn't Jinnah and our other leaders in the country's independence movement tirelessly claim and succeed in convincing the world at large that the Muslims of India constituted not a minority community but a separate nation entitled for a homeland of its own?
Owing to the state’s policies, the society has become far too intolerant on anything even distantly related to religion. These issues are viewed in black and white terms without the slightest recognition of grey areas. It's at this point where state narrative should start acting from and fight out on ideological front supplemented by military operations. Pakistan will continue to struggle to stamp out violent extremism from the country unless state institutions overcome their naiveté to remove terrorism mainly through symptomatic treatment. Indeed, religious militancy and consequent terrorism aren't policing or security issues. They are related to the way religion is propagated, practiced and even exploited in this country in outright violation of the state's Constitution. After all, people in pre-Zia era were no lesser Muslims and their tolerance of sectarian and political dissent should serve as a guide to counter the menace of violent extremism.
A possible solution lies in state reclaiming its superseding monopoly in regulating factors responsible for the chaos. In this regard, the National Action Plan (NAP) could have been a modest step towards making Pakistan free from sectarian bigotry and terrorism. Unfortunately, implementation on the NAP fell appallingly short on the top five of the twenty points related to containing terrorists and their abettors. It's so telling that when the 21st amendment was debated in the parliament, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) abstained from voting in favour of the proposed law. JI wanted the word religion to be omitted from the text of the bill while JUI insisted that the word sect is objectionable. Such was the level of disarray among political leaders even after the tragic APS incident.
State institutions' enthusiasm for NAP also gradually withered away have witnessed in the last two years. Just one of the many instances from the government's conduct suffices to note how confused it has been. Last October, the government denied the PTI to hold its convention in Islamabad as the banned terror group ASWJ comfortably held its rally in the federal capital.
The enthusiasm of the state has rekindled in the aftermath of a series of suicide attacks across Pakistan just recently. The military, like in past, has launched yet another operation to eliminate terrorism across Pakistan, which is still ongoing as mentioned initially. Unfortunately, this rinse-repeat strategy of launching military offensives after periodic large-scale massacres hasn't helped us much. And it can't help beyond removal of a cohort of terrorists operating at any given time.
Until the state and its strategic institutions come forward with outright clarity and vision to institutionalise and enforce the narrative of peace and coexistence within the society, we have no deliverance in sight. The day the government gets determined to regulate seminaries, promote diversified culture in the society and prevent religious outfits from hovering over our security and foreign policy, we will finally be able to move towards the right direction.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/12-Apr-17/pakistan-needs-a-narrative-of-peace-and-coexistence
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Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
By Wajid Shamsul Hasan
12-Apr-17
“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a time-tested maxim. If a victim does not get legal redress from a court of law in reasonable time, it means that he is denied justice. Its best manifestation is available in the British Magna Carta in the dictum of the most famous writ of habeas corpus. It empowers the court to order the executive to produce “the body” of a victim, believed to be held in unlawful detention, before a judge immediately. This one legal provision has made British legal system perhaps the best and the most pristine in the world.
Before and during the martial law of General Ayub Khan or whenever the government of the day was oppressive, the writ of habeas corpus used to be the most popular and most often resorted to legal redress for a victim of high-handedness by the police or the administration. The beauty of the writ of habeas corpus was that it could provide instant justice.
Regretfully, the effectiveness of the writ of habeas corpus in Pakistan seems to have been lost in the wilderness of judicial activism, and it has rather been replaced by suo motu notices that could be taken on individual whims and eccentricities.
Using these notices, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and his colleagues could fix prices of essential commodities without realising that fluctuation in rates depends on the principle of demand and supply. His main interests were personal glorification, pelf, power, and protocol, rather than pushing for speedier justice at all levels.
Regretfully, Justice Chaudhry was among those judges who legally endorsed General Pervez Musharraf’s dismissal of an elected government and legitimised the dictator’s fraudulent referendum. While suo motu is a different ball game, the setting up of military courts has perhaps made the writ of habeas corpus redundant for now. But that is a separate story.
Although one would not like to comment on cases pending before the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, however, a brief reference of the case related to Dr Asim Hussain would suffice to expose the high-handedness of law-enforcers and the apparent failure of the judiciary to address the glaring instance of denial of justice through delay in the matter.
Dr Asim Hussain, a former Senator and a federal minister, was arrested in August 2015 by the Rangers and drowned into a plethora of charges of corruption involving billions of rupees and of providing treatment at his hospital of some alleged terrorists. Whatever the Rangers, the FIA or the NAB dished out against Dr Asim during his 19-month detention remained unproven till the time he was recently released on bail in a poor health condition.
This brings us to the popular media interpretation of Dr Asim’s release on bail by the Sindh High Court. Most TV channels have been heard parroting that it all happened because of a political deal between the PPP and the PML-N. I have listened to various channels and discussions on everything under the sun by so-called panels of experts that have included members of the legal fraternity and invariably a retired army general. No one was willing to give credit to the Sindh High Court judges for having given relief to Dr Asim that was long overdue. Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf leader Imran Khan was shown every five minutes in various programme repeating the allegation that Dr Asim’s release on bail was due to a ‘muk mukka’ (settlement) between the two parties.
Being a land of conspiracies that are hatched in every nook and cranny, Pakistan’s ‘muk mukka syndrome’ is also casting a shadow of doubt as to whether the outcome of the mother of all judgements (in the Panama Leaks case) would be on merit or not. The apex judiciary is caught in a Catch-22 situation. In is article “Panama and sugar woes”, leading columnist Ayaz Amir has said, “What is unfolding is certainly extraordinary, something they (the Sharif family) have never experienced before.”
Amir says that Sharifs have been in “the game of power and pocket-lining for a long time, the longest in Pakistan’s history. The Sharifs have had their indulgent judges who could be depended upon to return indulgent verdicts.” He believes that times have changed and options have dwindled. It is no longer possible to do what the PML-N managed so brilliantly in 1997 by storming the Supreme Court and sending Chief Justice (late) Sajjad Ali Shah home by using what martyred Benazir Bhutto used to call “chamak”, to influence a whole herd of judges to revolt against the Supreme Court chief justice.
While not in a position to predict what good or bad is around the corner, one hopes that those who matter in the apex judiciary, and towards whom all anxious eyes are riveted, would remember the wise words of President Mamnoon Hussain. Soon after the Panama leaks controversy started, Hussain had said that “the Panama leaks were a visitation from the skies, and to save the country from the curse of corruption it was imperative that one should get to the bottom of Panama leaks and pull out corruption from its very roots.”
Source; dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/12-Apr-17/-justice-delayed-is-justice-denied
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URL: https://newageislam.com/pakistan-press/navigating-complex-middle-east-new/d/110729