From Solidarity with Hazaras to a Common Destiny

A recent sur­vey by Pew Research Cen­ter gives a bleak pic­ture of the sec­tar­i­an divide in Pak­istani soci­ety. Accord­ing to the sur­vey, about 50% of Sun­ni Mus­lims in Pak­istan con­sid­er Shia beliefs to be heretic or a deviant form of Islam. Fur­ther to this, there is polar­iza­tion with­in soci­ety on almost every social and polit­i­cal issue. If con­sen­sus does exist on some issues, there are dif­fer­ences of opin­ion regard­ing the per­tain­ing solu­tions and poli­cies. The gen­er­al apa­thy sur­round­ing the per­se­cu­tion of the Haz­ara Shia com­mu­ni­ty is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of such polar­iza­tion. How­ev­er, in recent weeks an unprece­dent­ed show of sol­i­dar­i­ty for the Haz­ara com­mu­ni­ty was dis­played across the coun­try. The slo­gan of ‘We are all Haz­ara’ became a meme.

The Haz­ara Shia com­mu­ni­ty of Pak­istan has been fac­ing sys­tem­at­ic per­se­cu­tion for the past decade or so.  More than one thou­sand inno­cent Haz­ara men, women and chil­dren have lost their lives to date mere­ly due to their reli­gious beliefs.  But the inci­dent on 10^th Jan­u­ary, when twin sui­cide blasts on Quetta’s Alam­dar Road killed more than 120 peo­ple (most of them Haz­aras) was the most dev­as­tat­ing one so far. The bereaved com­mu­ni­ty took the dead bod­ies of their loved ones to the site of the blast and refused to bury them until their demands were met by the author­i­ties.

Hun­dreds of peo­ple, includ­ing women and chil­dren,  staged a sit-in in freez­ing tem­per­a­tures to demand pro­tec­tion and jus­tice. The unusu­al sight of women in this polit­i­cal gath­er­ing and the fact that reli­gious teach­ings instruct Mus­lims to bury the dead as soon as pos­si­ble, couldn’t have sent a clear­er reminder of the help­less­ness and mis­ery of the Haz­ara com­mu­ni­ty. These heart­break­ing images forced com­mon Pak­ista­nis to come out of their homes and par­tic­i­pate in the sit-ins to show sol­i­dar­i­ty for those in mourn­ing and to con­demn this bar­bar­ic act.

The sit-in that start­ed in Quet­ta was soon fol­lowed by protests in oth­er major cities. Civ­il soci­ety activists and rights orga­ni­za­tions staged vig­ils where non-Shias were out­num­bered by Shias. At Lib­er­ty Round­about in Lahore, mem­bers of the Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty, them­selves vic­tims of reli­gious extrem­ism, par­tic­i­pat­ed with great enthu­si­asm.

Two aspects which make these nation­wide protests dis­tinc­tive are worth men­tion­ing. First­ly, the non­vi­o­lent nature and dis­ci­pline of these protests was so remark­able that not even a sin­gle bul­let was fired or a tire set ablaze. Sec­ond­ly, peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ed in these protests to not only to show their sol­i­dar­i­ty for the bereaved com­mu­ni­ty but also out of a sense of gen­er­al inse­cu­ri­ty as cit­i­zens of a state where reli­gious and sec­tar­i­an dif­fer­ences might even­tu­al­ly become the rea­son for their death.

The protests result­ed in the procla­ma­tion of Gov­er­nor Rule and the sack­ing of the inef­fec­tive gov­ern­ment of Chief Min­is­ter Raisani. The lev­el of insen­si­tiv­i­ty of the incum­bent CM was such that he used to mock seri­ous secu­ri­ty issues with his pet­ty jokes. Leav­ing aside the fruit­ful­ness of the Gov­er­nor Rule, this suc­cess has at least set a pos­i­tive prece­dent that peace­ful, non-vio­lent protests are more effec­tive and far-reach­ing than out­ra­geous vig­i­lan­tism in which pub­lic prop­er­ties are destroyed. More­over it also proves that any sort of armed retal­i­a­tion would also be futile.

As I write these lines I remem­ber Irfan Khu­di Ali, a human rights activist and one of the vic­tims of the blasts. My last inter­ac­tion with him was at a juice shop on the same Alam­dar Road where he embraced mar­tyr­dom. I remem­ber him men­tion­ing how as Pak­ista­nis we have selec­tive moral out­rage when it comes to human rights advo­ca­cy. He said that we seem too con­cerned about the Rohingya Mus­lims but at the same time indif­fer­ent to the per­se­cu­tion of our own com­pa­tri­ots. While quot­ing Saa­dat Has­san Manto’s famous say­ing “Don’t say that 1 lac Mus­lims and 1 lac Hin­dus have been killed, say 2 lac humans have been killed”, he urged to raise our voic­es for all the voice­less com­mu­ni­ties in Pak­istan and around the world. He was indeed blessed with a true human­is­tic soul. Today he would have been proud to see that his coun­try­men have come out to join his community’s cause and are unit­ed on a sim­ple yet pow­er­ful idea that per­se­cu­tion of any­one on the basis of creed is not accept­able.

The Haz­ara cause should not be seen as an iso­lat­ed issue from the rest of Pak­istan but an indi­ca­tor of how injus­tice to one com­mu­ni­ty is bound to spread to the rest. Sim­i­lar­ly, our moral sup­port should not be exclu­sive­ly for Haz­aras but should include the com­mu­ni­ties whose graves and wor­ship places are des­e­crat­ed every oth­er day in this land of the pure. The muti­lat­ed bod­ies in Balochis­tan are a stain on our col­lec­tive moral­i­ty and our apa­thy towards it equals legit­imiz­ing this heinous act.

In fact, stand­ing for the rights of minori­ties is noth­ing short of stand­ing for the noble ideals of reli­gious free­dom, plu­ral­ism and equal­i­ty; the ideals Jin­nah men­tioned in his famous speech before the Con­stituent Assem­bly on 11^th August 1947. In his speech, Jin­nah envi­sioned the nature of a new­ly born nation where the state would not inter­fere with the beliefs of her cit­i­zens. Hence any effort to pro­tect a vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ty is like embrac­ing, cher­ish­ing and real­iz­ing Jin­nah’s Pak­istan.

Although we fol­low dif­fer­ent reli­gions and sects, speak dif­fer­ent lan­guages and have dis­tinct racial fea­tures, there is an ever­last­ing rela­tion, the thread of human­i­ty, which binds all of us. Beliefs are dif­fer­ent, but our des­tiny is the same and that des­tiny is a coun­try where peo­ple won’t be dis­crim­i­nat­ed on the basis of their iden­ti­ty. Let’s embark col­lec­tive­ly on this jour­ney towards a high moral ground with non-vio­lence as a weapon and human­i­ty as our pri­ma­ry slo­gan, the way the Haz­aras did.

—Writ­ten by Roohul­lah Gulzari

(Pub­lished in The Laal­tain — Issue 7)