Editorial

Rab Nawaz

Dear Read­ers,
A Belat­ed Mer­ry Christ­mas and Hap­py New Year to all our read­ers! We are proud to present to you the sec­ond issue of The Laal­tain mag­a­zine – a pub­li­ca­tion put togeth­er after sev­er­al sleep­less nights, end­less cups of cof­fee and fre­quent pan­ic attacks by mem­bers of our team.

Those of you who saw our first issue might have noticed a change in the size of the mag­a­zine this time around (those who’ve nev­er heard of The Laal­tain before obvi­ous­ly have no clue what we’re talk­ing about, so best to just ignore this bit!). Any­way, the size thing was imple­ment­ed when we real­ized that quite apart from sav­ing loads of paper (which is good for the envi­ron­ment) a small­er mag­a­zine would be much more user-friend­ly. The new size got a lot of pos­i­tive feed­back from those we asked, and we hope you like it too.

The advent of 2011 has brought with it all the hope and opti­mism that comes with new begin­nings. How­ev­er, the chance to rev­el in this pos­i­tiv­i­ty has proved to be short-lived. As this edi­to­r­i­al was being writ­ten on 4th Jan­u­ary 2011, news of the bru­tal assas­si­na­tion of Pun­jab Gov­er­nor Salman Taseer was just pour­ing in. Even more shock­ing was the state­ment of his assas­sin – a man belong­ing to the Governor’s own secu­ri­ty pro­to­col – who claimed he had com­mit­ted this crime as ret­ri­bu­tion for the politician’s out­spo­ken oppo­si­tion to Pakistan’s blas­phe­my laws.

Almost imme­di­ate­ly, media chan­nels and online social net­works were ablaze with people’s reac­tions. Some were glo­ri­fy­ing the event as a ‘vic­to­ry’ for Islam, oth­ers dis­missed it as the death of just anoth­er ‘cor­rupt politi­cian’, but there were also those ask­ing some trou­bling ques­tions: regard­less of our per­son­al views on the Pun­jab Gov­er­nor or the blas­phe­my laws, do we want to live in a coun­try where the price of express­ing an opin­ion or stat­ing a point of view is death? Where do we take our thoughts if we must stay silent at the risk of our lives? Has the space for social­ly respon­si­ble debate com­plete­ly van­ished in our coun­try? What lies in store for a soci­ety where indi­vid­u­als feel they can take the law into their own hands to deliv­er swift ‘jus­tice’ in the name of reli­gion?

There seem to be no easy answers.
For the team at The Laal­tain, this has been a stark reminder of why we start­ed our mag­a­zine in the first place. Our aim was to cre­ate a plat­form where the young peo­ple of this coun­try – num­ber­ing well over a hun­dred mil­lion at last count – can hear and be heard. A place where free and fear­less debate would be encour­aged and com­mu­ni­ca­tion would be the key in pro­mot­ing a spir­it of tol­er­ance. And before any of you start rolling your eyes at the clichés, just take a moment to think about how many such plat­forms you know of that are in exis­tence in Pak­istan today. And if you can’t think of any, or you can count them on one hand, we’ve made our point.