Laaltain

The Spell of Silence: Cancellation of Event at LUMS and the Aftermath

15 اپریل، 2015

The forced can­cel­la­tion of an aca­d­e­m­ic talk titled ‘Unsi­lenc­ing Balochis­tan’ at the Lahore Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­age­ment Sciences(LUMS) last Thurs­day has attract­ed much atten­tion in the news and social media.

As a reac­tion to the can­cel­la­tion, stu­dents of LUMS have begun protest­ing state cen­sor­ship and clam­our­ing on the issue of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom both on cam­pus and var­i­ous oth­er forums par­tic­u­lar­ly the social media.

Pre­dictably, stu­dents’ cam­paigns have invit­ed attacks, dis­parag­ing com­ments and accu­sa­tions; with jour­nal­ists like Moeed Pirza­da and Zaid Hamid’s pro­tégé Ahmed Quraishi jump­ing on the band­wag­on. A great chunk of the reproach faced by the stu­dents and the fac­ul­ty amounts to plain threats and abus­es.

Those crit­i­cis­ing the orga­niz­ers of the event have also been pre­pos­ter­ous­ly draw­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty between Mama Qadeer and Mul­lah Fazlul­lah. LUMS is being alleged for delib­er­ate­ly pre­sent­ing a biased nar­ra­tive, and for malign­ing Pak­istan– the age-old nation­al favourite charge. What is more out­ra­geous is that the can­ce­la­tion of talk is being relat­ed to the mur­der of poor labour­ers in Tur­bat.

It is tru­ly unset­tling that a dis­cus­sion of Pakistan’s prob­lems is more wor­ry­ing to some, and more malign­ing of Pak­istan, than the exis­tence of these prob­lems them­selves regard­ing which the least we can do is not be silent about.

The first strand estab­lish­es com­par­isons between Mul­lah Fazlul­lah and Mama Qadeer. Although it is an insult­ing blow to one’s men­tal and intel­lec­tu­al capac­i­ties to respond to such inani­ties, it is nec­es­sary in order to dis­pel mis­con­cep­tions which hold Mama Qadeer to be a ter­ror­ist or mil­i­tant. Mama Qadeer is a sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an who marched 2,000 kilo­me­tres on foot from Quet­ta to Islam­abad with a group of Baloch men, women and chil­dren to draw atten­tion and alarm to the enforced dis­ap­pear­ances in Balochis­tan through non­vi­o­lent and peace­ful means. On the oth­er hand Mul­lah Fazlul­lah is the head of TTP that has open­ly declared war on Pak­istan and prides itself on its hands seeped red with the blood of thou­sands of Pak­ista­nis.

Hamid Mir was spot on to point this out on Twit­ter,“There is not a sin­gle ter­ror­ism case reg­is­tered against Mama Qadeer Baloch any­where in Pak­istan; he is a human rights activist.”

Abbas Nasir, wrote in his Dawn on the issue:“Whether Mama Qadeer, whose whole cam­paign was trig­gered by his son’s dis­ap­pear­ance in Balochis­tan, is a sep­a­ratist, an ultra-nation­al­ist or a die hard patri­ot is beside the point. What ought to be unde­ni­able is that he has a right to speak.”

Mov­ing on, the talk at LUMS was accused of pre­sent­ing a biased pic­ture, and of malign­ing Pak­istan, and that it should’ve includ­ed oth­er point of views in order to ‘bal­ance’ it. With a spe­cial focus on the press­ing and dis­turb­ing issue of the Miss­ing Per­sons, the rea­son a pan­el of Baloch and oth­er human rights activists and aca­d­e­mics was con­sti­tut­ed was because of the very fact that the state’s nar­ra­tive has got­ten ample space and been fed to peo­ple in increas­ing dos­es since Pak­istan came into exis­tence.

The prac­tice of silenc­ing is not new in Pak­istan. It is the norm, and the con­struc­tion and monop­o­liza­tion of nar­ra­tives is cen­tral to this.

Saroop Ijaz empha­sis­es the same in his arti­cle in Express Tri­bune ‘The Absur­di­ty of Silenc­ing’: “The view of the State is inescapable, from tele­vi­sion screens to school cur­ricu­lum, and by the time they get to Uni­ver­si­ty most stu­dents can nar­rate the offi­cial point of view almost on auto-pilot.”

And if rais­ing issue of the Miss­ing Per­sons is an act of trash­ing Pakistan’s image, then the Supreme Court of Pak­istan must be held most at guilt. More­over even after the administration’s offers to include more peo­ple in the pan­el in order to dilute per­cep­tions of bias, the forced can­cel­la­tion was still pushed ahead. The talk was pure­ly an aca­d­e­m­ic dis­cus­sion which was to be mod­er­at­ed and lat­er sub­ject­ed to the ques­tions and com­ments of stu­dents, of what was expect­ed to be a jam-packed ses­sion. It is tru­ly unset­tling that a dis­cus­sion of Pakistan’s prob­lems is more wor­ry­ing to some, and more malign­ing of Pak­istan, than the exis­tence of these prob­lems them­selves regard­ing which the least we can do is not be silent about.

The notion that LUMS was pre­sent­ing some biased or mis­in­formed pic­ture hinges large­ly on the assump­tion that peo­ple are not intel­li­gent enough to think for them­selves and dis­cern bias. It is in this con­text that the rejec­tion of the state-imposed intel­lec­tu­al & aca­d­e­m­ic guardian­ship and state-sanc­tioned ‘truths’ becomes impor­tant.

The late Eqbal Ahmad wrote in 1995:“I do not know of any coun­try’s edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem that so explic­it­ly sub­or­di­nates knowl­edge to pol­i­tics. Teach­ing and writ­ing of history.…has now passed from his­to­ri­ans to hacks.”

It is deplorable how Eqbal Ahmad’s words were ignored then, only to res­onate rel­e­vant even today as Pak­istan con­tin­ues its descent into decline.

Com­ing to the last strand, unfor­tu­nate­ly the bru­tal killing of labour­ers in Tur­bat was used as ammu­ni­tion in the vol­leys hurled at LUMS stu­dents on social media irre­spec­tive of the fact that abhor­rence towards state sub­ju­ga­tion of the Baloch and towards the oppres­sion car­ried out on non-Baloch by non-state actors is not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive; but very much in the same vein.

Colum­nist Abdul Majeed Abid also threw light on a sig­nif­i­cant aspect:
“Lives of Set­tlers in Balochis­tan are as impor­tant as the rest. Just refrain from using one atroc­i­ty to silence the oth­er.”

The prac­tice of silenc­ing is not new in Pak­istan. It is the norm, and the con­struc­tion and monop­o­liza­tion of nar­ra­tives is cen­tral to this. A strik­ing tes­ta­ment to this is found when nar­ra­tives dis­sim­i­lar and diver­gent from the dom­i­nant one are con­sid­ered and denounced as a threat.

Pak­istan needs to engage with and with­in itself. There are atroc­i­ties, there are griev­ances, there is dis­sent and sup­press­ing them is not the solu­tion since we all know how well that worked out in ’71 at the cost of blood and half of the coun­try.

The forced can­cel­la­tion of ‘Unsi­lenc­ing Balochis­tan’ has remind­ed us that Balochis­tan is clos­er to home than we think.

State intru­sion in intel­lec­tu­al spaces is an assault not lim­it­ed to the aca­d­e­m­ic sphere. It is a threat to all free voic­es and minds any­where in Pak­istan. The neces­si­ty to have a con­ver­sa­tion, a dia­logue can­not assert itself more sharply than today because for too long silence has pre­vailed, and for too long we have sur­ren­dered to its spell, and the pow­ers that sum­mon it. Let this be not any longer.

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