Pakistan - The Qadri courtroom

By Ayaz Amir

Everyone is entitled to his prejudices. If Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, former chief justice of the Lahore High Court, is convinced that he is charting a course to heaven by defending Mumtaz Qadri in court, that’s his privilege and who is to stop him. Another former high court judge, Mian Nazeer Akhtar, is also defending Mumtaz Qadri in his appeal before the Islamabad High Court against his death sentence by a lower court.

Qadri, as we should know, is not just any murder accused. He has become a special person, an accredited hero of the faith, or at least of its Barelvi persuasion, for having emptied his Kalashnikov magazine into the body of the Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer, on whose security detail he was deputed. He did this because he believed that the governor had committed blasphemy (by questioning the procedure of the blasphemy law, Section 295-C of the Penal Code) and for this heresy he deserved to be put to death. Killing him thus amounted to fulfilling a higher obligation.

A related circumstance should not be overlooked. In the Rawalpindi locality in which he lived Qadri had occasion to listen to fiery speeches by maulvis who denounced Taseer for blasphemy. On an impressionable mind – and someone who can kill for religion arguably has an impressionable mind – such hate-filled sermons would have acted like dynamite. Taseer’s other sin of course was that he had visited Aasia Bibi in jail – the woman from a poor background sentenced to death on a charge of blasphemy (her appeal is pending in the Supreme Court).

When first brought before a magistrate after Taseer’s killing, frenzied lawyers, ecstasy written on their faces, showered Qadri with rose petals, confirming his budding status as a hero of the faith. In the current appeal hearing a bevy of lawyers is assisting, if only with their presence, the two former justices who are actually arguing the case.

Qadri thus is not only well-represented, you might say he is over-represented (although when I listened to Mian Nazeer, one of the two defence counsel, I nearly fell asleep even as the two justices hearing the appeal – their lordships Noorul Haq Qureshi and Shaukat Siddiqui – put up a brave effort to look interested).

Apart from lawyers, activists affiliated with a small Barelvi outfit – Shabab Islami Pakistan – under the command of a Rawalpindi khateeb, Hanif Qureshi, regularly assemble on the road outside to chant slogans in Qadri’s support. The day I was there, there must have been around a hundred, or at best a hundred and fifty, of these firebrands. When I spoke to Hanif Qureshi he informed me that he had been to Chakwal several times on speaking missions. He said he knew my views but that we were all entitled to our opinions…with which I could scarcely disagree.

But if this was the Qadri lineup, what about the other side? The Taseer family has hired no private lawyer, and no heavy-duty lawyers, or even light-duty ones, have rushed forward on their own. I was half-expecting, however, some token if not full-blown presence of ‘civil society’, of which we otherwise hear so much. But there was not a soul from that quarter, none of the usual bazookas and Amazons who specialise in candle-lit vigils usually in the relative safety of Super Market and Kohsaar Market.

And no representation, none at all, from that pillar of freedom and secularism, the PPP, the party after all to which Taseer belonged when he was assassinated. The National Assembly was in session. Could not some PPP members have made an appearance in a gesture of support, if not for Taseer personally for the larger cause which in death at least he symbolises? Perish the thought.

We have no shortage of op-ed writers going red in the face as they hold forth on what the Qadri case means for Pakistan – whether this will be a country forever under the influence of the bigoted rightwing or a country opting for the paths of freedom and tolerance. To my mind, this is a false dichotomy. Pakistan’s problem is not so much the power of the religious right as the fecklessness and lack of spirit of the liberal left, what may be loosely called the liberati…the liberal, English-educated classes.

Take in the evidence. Whereas the half-tutored and half-lettered battalions of the religious right are ready to take to the streets at a moment’s notice, and at the slightest provocation, in defence of obscure and often hard-to-understand causes, the liberati for the most part are armchair samurai, waging their battles – in a language and an idiom which most Pakistanis find hard to comprehend – from the deep comfort of their sofas. 

Class divisions are at work here. The liberati constitute this country’s privileged classes – those who have everything, for whom this system works, indeed who benefit the most from the inequities of this system. The traditional left is dead in Pakistan: it exists no more. Trade unionism is dead; student activism is a thing of the past. The religious right by no means represents the have-nots of Pakistan (if it did it would fare better at the polls) but it comes from the have-not sections of society. It is drawn from there. And between privileged Pakistan and de-privileged Pakistan there is no meeting point.

Let us not be under the misapprehension that the periodic agitations of the religious right – whether against some cartoons published abroad, or against supposed blasphemy or some obscure film made on the Californian coast – are in defence of the faith or for its greater glory. These stirrings are a bid for greater importance, for a greater share of the pie. They are a bid for power.

The Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is a grab for power. The Taliban insurgency is a bid for power. What was Mullah Fazlullah before he set up his radio station and took up arms? 

Nothing, counting for nothing in this society. What was Mangal Bagh before becoming a militant leader? A truck driver. The entire Taliban leadership is made up of figures from humble beginnings rising to positions of unimagined authority and power. And their methods are barbaric – slitting of throats, etc – because their world-view is that of the village preacher blaring out his message through a loudspeaker. Place a gun in the hands of such a person and he will behave as the Swat Taliban did: with unrivalled brutality.

Pakistan’s tragedy or, if tragedy be too strong a word, its failing is that the privileged classes, the elites, have not done what was in their enlightened self-interest to do: create a more just, less unequal, society. What is more, the elites are distracted: some of their interests are still in this country, but many are now abroad. To the defence of Pakistan they cannot summon up that commitment which the Taliban and the religious right bring to the destruction of Pakistan.

By design or accident, Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri tried to change the terms of this dialectic. They tried to lift the liberati from their sofas and bring them into the hurly-burly of the political mainstream. But it was a confused effort, sustained by no cogent political argument. So it has proved abortive, and the two knights, licking their wounds, are still in the process of figuring out what their next step should be. 

To sum up, the Qadri trial is not showcasing the power of the religious right. To think so is to get the whole thing wrong. As I have tried to explain, there is very little raw power on display. But it is a commentary, albeit in a minor key, on the indifference if not the helplessness of the enlightened left.