Two events sum up Pakistan's crisis of society and state on the threshold of the new millennium. First, the double murder in of Prof Zahoorul Akhlaq and his 24 years old daughter Jehan Ara. One of Pakistan's leading painters, Professor Akhlaq and his daughter, an accomplished classical dancer, were gunned down during Eid days for no other reason than a vindictive young man's greed. Second, Nawaz Sharif government's  onslaught against the Jang group, south Asia's leading newspaper group.

At a press conference in Karachi on Thursday, the Group's chief executive Mir Shakil ur Rehman had some shocking revelation to make. An audio cassette of his conversation with the ehtesab chief, Saifur Rehman and information minister Mushahid Hussain gave disturbing testimony to Mir's alarm that the government is victimizing him for refusing to bow to its wish list. Such a wish list as the cassettes seems to suggest, includes the demand for sacking 14 senior journalists of Jang News Group and their replacement by government's nominees as well as demands for Jang's support on specific government policies. The murders in and the assault against Jang are two sides of a culture of gangsterism that has stripped the nation of its soul and society of its conscience. Indeed, if America spread us from being branded a terrorist state, the erosion of social conscience marks our slide into a terrorist society a society where institutions meant for upholding justice, order and security are becoming sites of violence torture and murder.

Such inversion of values was graphically depicted by the prime minister in speech on June 11,1997. In that speech, Nawaz Sharif noted that ours' had become a society where hospital, courts and offices had turned into sources of terror and despair rather than service and justice. Sparked by yet another senseless murder and its after-math the letter of a daughter whose father died of gunshot wounds in a hospital that refused him medial care. Sharif's speech seemed a veritable plea to stern the collective slide into what he warned could be a horrible fate. It may Pakistanis saw Sharif is impassioned critique as nothing but cheap theatrics rather than a call of conscience. Subsequent event seems to have proved them right. Not long after this speech Islamabad's supreme court building was attacked by workers of Nawaz Sharif's Muslim league, and his government presided over what has been described as the greatest bank robbery in history when foreign currency accounts were frozen even as government cronies were reportedly allowed to transfer millions abroad following Pakistan's nuclear explosions last May.

Given such a content of deceit and coercion it is vital for remands of sanity in the judiciary army and the press to take serious note of the apprehensions Mir Shakil has publicly aired following his defiance of the government's attempts to impose its policies on him. With Mir's life threatened the Group's accounts frozen, its newsprint warehouse sealed and demands that he pay million in income tax within a short span of days one wonders if the horrible fate that the prime minister warned us in his June 11 speech is designed only against those who dare to think and speak differently from the government's script. That this may well be so is borne out by the bizarre contradictions thrown up into the open by the Jang government tussle.

While the editors and staff of the Jang Group are being harassed and intimidated, hardened bank defaulters and all those who stole from the national treasury to build their own fortunes remain scot free. Given such a complete inversion of values of truth by lies and decency be deceit it is a matter of little surprise that Mr Saifur Rehman continues to be the Ehtesab chief even if for many his credibility is no better than Asif Zardari's .

Even so, if both Asif Zardari and Saifur Rehman see themselves as conscientious pillars of their respective party and government and victims of conspiracies such self absolution seems part and parcel of human nature. After all even Shahbaz the murderer of Professor Akhlaq and Jehan Ara, has his own version of self absolution to live by. When asked why he had not killed himself following the senseless murders, Shahbaz reportedly said that being a Muslim he could not have taken his own life for Islam prohibits suicides.

The unstated assumption of such reasoning that it's OK to violate other rights so long as one can get away with it lies at the heart of a culture that has spawned a terrorist society where democracy has become synonymous with corruption and Islam with terror. Such society has no room for Akhlaq character. Such society has no room for Akhlaq, character, decency and harmony . No wonder that Syed Ahmed Khan's crusade for Tahzibul Akhlaq that laid the ethical and intellectual foundation of a movement leading to Pakistan's creation is all but forgotten. Also forgotten is the historical fact that the Muslim league's birth in 1906 was the high point of a cultural and intellectual movement that Syed initiated when he founded the Mohammedan Education Conference in 1886.

Our amnesia of our creative past is bound to hurl us even deeper into abyss, where party goons, who storm the supreme court are garlanded and discredited . In such a moral void, one wonders if by entrusting the sanctity of ehtesab into more credible hands the prime minister could still avert what may well become Waterloo of his own making.

(The News 2.2.1999)

Phone: + 92 42 6666404 - 6687827
 

 

 
E-mail: jrc@syberwurx.com