Neither pure nor vile
From Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent (Pluto Press).
I was visiting New York when the news of the massacre of 15 Christians in Bahawalpur flashed up on CNN. It was a brief item, included in an update on the war, and all that the casual viewer would know was that ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ had struck again. As I had once spent some balmy days in Bahawalpur, I was touched and disturbed by the news, which was both one more horror among so many others in recent weeks, and at the same time something more intimate. I draped myself in the tie-dyed shawl I had purchased for one hundred Pakistani rupees in Bahawalpur’s 18th century bazaar, and ventured out into the brisk autumn air of the traumatised city.
The weather in New York was not that different from the late January week I had spent in Bahawalpur twenty months earlier. It’s a small city in deepest southern Punjab, perched on the edge of the desert that stretches across the border with India. A series of Anglophile Nawabs ornamented the old walled city with a fine fringe of colleges, hospitals and administrative buildings in various styles of late Victorian Mughal-Italianate-Gothic, as well as one of the country’s most disgracefully-underused cricket grounds, the placid Dring Stadium. In recent decades, development has sprawled across the vast adjacent plane, and the armed forces now occupy huge encampments outside the city, side by side with an industrial complex dominated by Novartis, the agro-chemical multinational. Nonetheless, Bahawalpur retains a pleasantly provincial air. The streets are lined with trees and, by Pakistani standards, the traffic is calm.
Since it is no longer (post-partition) on the way to or from anywhere of importance, Bahawalpur attracts few casual visitors. Like most tourists who make it this far, I had come in part to see the 15th century blue-glazed tile-clad shrines in nearby Uch Sharif. Once upon a time, before the river Chenab altered course, Uch was a major centre of Islamic study. Today it is a dilapidated rural outpost, distinguished by exquisite remains in the form of shrines and mosques built to honour Sufi saints – some from as far away as Bokhara in Uzbekistan and Tabriz in Iran. In Europe or even in India, monuments of such delicate magnificence would become the hub of a tourist industry. There would be hotels and restaurants and guides. Here, in a region largely neglected by central government, one is left to enjoy the elegant ceramic décor and the classically-proportioned domes and arches in tranquility. Women labouring in the neatly-irrigated fields surrounding the shrines meet an intrusive male foreigner with relaxed smiles and confident chatter. There are no veils. The taste is for bold, eye-catching colours – including the scarlet, gold and azure tie-dye pattern that later drew my eye in the Bahawalpur bazaar.
They call this region southern Punjab, but it feels a very long way from Lahore, the Punjabi provincial capital. The people here speak their own language, Seraiki, which boasts its own poetry and song and its own patron saints, commemorated in the shrines that everywhere dot the landscape. After a few days in Bahawalpur, I drove out into the Cholistan desert – an extension of the vast Thar desert through which the India-Pakistan border is drawn. Next to a wind-blown hamlet of mud-walled square-sided dwellings, there was a sand dune, now covered with green-painted concrete, venerated as the burial site of Chanon Pir, a mythic figure whose cult harks back to the centuries long before Islam, or even Hinduism or Buddhism, reached these parts. On the day I visited, people from settlements across Cholistan were assembling for the beginning of the Pir’s annual festival. The skies were blue, the air was temperate and the mood was cheerful. Devotees were performing rites around the shrine, accompanied by the drone of harmonium and patter of tabla. Men dressed as women danced and laughed and begged. Peddlers set out stalls of cheap plastic trinkets. And there was not a mullah in sight.
Watching the merry interaction of cross-dressers and camel-herders, truck-drivers and sweet-sellers, I wondered what on earth it meant to dub ourselves Muslim or Hindu, Pakistani or Indian, or Jew or American or New Yorker or Londoner. And I thought of the classic lyric of Bullah Shah, the 18th century Punjabi poet-sufi: “Bullah, what do I know of myself? I am no believer in mosque or temple. I am not pure. I am not vile. I’m no Moses and I’m no Pharaoh. Bullah, what do I know of myself?”
Back in New York City, on the day I learned of the Bahawalpur massacre, I dined with my sisters and brother, nieces and nephew, who live scattered across the United States. I was still wearing the tie-dyed shawl, now twisted, most un-Pakistani style, into a scarf around my neck. My ten year old Californian niece admired its vibrant colours, and I promised that the next time I went to Pakistan I would buy her one. She frowned. “In Pakistan, if you’re American, they chop off your hand.”
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What the CNN report did not ask was just how a war being fought across a border some 400 miles away could overflow into a place like Bahawalpur. But to ask that question would have been to invite some discomfiting answers.
A report into the massacre by investigators from the Commission on Peace and Justice, an independent human rights organisation, chronicles the events and the context. Early on the morning of Sunday, 28 October, some 50 local Protestants were singing the final hymn in their service at St Dominic’s Catholic church (the two local Christian communities are so small that they share the single church). Five men, said to be aged between twenty and twenty-five, rode up on two motorcycles. Three of them entered the church, quietly closed the door, shot dead the Muslim policeman stationed there, and sprayed the church with gunfire, killing fifteen, including the pastor, and injuring another seven. They then fled the scene, with their waiting accomplices, on the two motorcycles. Among the dead were six men, seven women, and two children.
At 11 am the following day, a mass funeral took place at the church. The entire city shut down as a mark of respect. According to local newspapers, 5,000 people took part in the ceremony. Muslims easily outnumbered Christians in the ranks lining both sides of the road leading from the church to the graveyard.
The killings were immediately condemned by General Musharraf and politicians of all stripes. Even the right-wing Urdu press, in a break with its more inflammatory habits, joined the condemnations and the calls for national unity. Eight members of two groups were quickly arrested – press reports said three belonged to Jash-e- Muhammad and five to Harkat-ul-Mujahidine, two of the numerous jehadi factions that have proliferated in Pakistan over the last twenty years, with support from the army and the intelligence services. Critics noted that although the local police had been warned about potential sectarian violence, and specifically asked to station an additional guard at the church in Bahawalpur, no precautionary measures had been taken. Government sources muttered darkly about ‘the foreign hand’, and in some quarters it was openly alleged that RAW, India’s intelligence agency, had masterminded the killings in an attempt to destabilise Pakistan – at the very moment that Pakistan was consolidating its new relationship with the United States.
In the aftermath of 11 September, faced with enraged and peremptory demands from the US government, the military regime in Islamabad had chosen the carrot over the stick, and signed up for the ‘war against terrorism’. As a result, an intimate relationship that had been fostered for more than two decades was suddenly severed. That was the relationship between the military and the multifarious outfits of the Islamist right – a force that has attracted few voters in any of Pakistan’s intermittent democratic elections, but has prospered thanks to sponsorship from Pakistan’s state-within-a-state. In places like Bahawalapur, there was no history of anything like Islamic fundamentalism until the 1980s, when as part of the US-sponsored war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and with full US government cognisance and approval, a new form of highly-organised and belligerent religious intolerance, completely at odds with Seraiki and sufi traditions, made its appearance.
Although the Bahawalpur massacre is probably the worst atrocity to be inflicted on Pakistan’s Christian community, it is by no means an isolated incident. The 2.2 million Pakistani Christians comprise the country’s largest non-Muslim minority. They are descendants of lower caste Hindus who sought in conversion – but did not find – relief from age-old oppression. They remain among the poorest and most abused people in Pakistani society, and as a result of the military-Islamist tie-up their situation over the last twenty years has deteriorated. Under Zia’s dictatorship, Christians were effectively disenfranchised, forced to vote in an apartheid-like ‘separate electorate’. They were also subject to discrimination in the courts because of ‘Islamic’ legal reforms and to prosecution under the blasphemy laws. The latter proved a handy tool for pursuing personal vendettas as well as for jehadi demagogues looking to provoke communal conflict. As the jehadi groups received increasing aid and succour from Zia’s regime in the 80s, sectarian violence – against Shias, other Muslim minorities, and Christians – rose steadily, and did not abate with the return of democracy in the late 80s. In 1995, Manzoor Masih, a Christian on trial in a blasphemy case, was shot dead on the premises of the Lahore high court. In 1996, Shanti Nagar, a Christian village near Khanewal (also in southern Punjab) was burnt to the ground, with the apparent collusion of local police.
The authors of the Commission for Peace and Justice report ask “why a community, the majority of which is already leading a vulnerable life, and whose loyalty to the country is indisputable, should be targeted in any organized violence”? In answering that question, they place the Bahawalpur attack in an international context. “The wrong notion of some people, relating the interests of Pakistani Christians with the west, should be put to an end now… After September 11, the change in the international scenario also affected the atmosphere of Pakistan and the extremists got a boost, especially after October 7 with the US attacks on Afghanistan… and if the war continues long, this is not going to be rooted out.” The authors of the report conclude that until state-sponsored discrimination against Christians is eliminated, and until the police take a firmer grip on the sectarian terrorists, Christian communities will remain vulnerable.
On CNN, the massacre in Bahawalpur was just another headline atrocity, another example of the violence wracking the Muslim world and Pakistan in particular. There was, inevitably, no mention of the decisive role the US had played in nurturing the sources of this violence, nor of the discriminatory policies of the Pakistani state. No indication that long-standing traditions of secularism and religious tolerance had been slapped aside by remote geopolitical interests. No reference to the persecution of Christians across the border, in India, under the Hindu fundamentalist BJP government, the US’s ally in ‘the war against terrorism’. No hint of the real meaning, the resonant tragedy, of these deaths. And therefore no illumination of the succession of horrors – the villages carpet bombed, the prisoners executed, the refugees forever on the move – that make up this war.
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In the week following the Bahawalpur massacre, as the B52s pounded Afghanistan, the New York Yankees played the Arizona Diamondbacks in the World Series. As a long-time Yankee fan I would normally have welcomed the rare chance to watch my childhood favourites in action. But there was something about the way a war-time USA had re-packaged the Yankees that deterred me. Suddenly ‘those damn Yankees’ were ‘America’s team’, bearers of the cause of the thousands killed in the World Trade Centre. It was conveniently forgotten that, until 11 September, Yankee-hating was the norm across the rest of the country, as was a muted suspicion and hostility to New York in general. When the Yanks lost the series opener in Arizona by 12-1, the New York Post, under an image of the WTC ruins, ran a front page headline reading: “Yankees slaughtered in the desert”. Can you blame me for getting muddled about what was at issue here – baseball or war?
Feeling increasingly alienated from my native city, I found myself in a taxi heading downtown for a meeting with a local anti-war activist. Like nearly all the cabs in New York, and certainly all those driven by people from south Asia or the Middle East, this one was festooned with American flags. I asked the driver where he was from. “Pakistan,” he answered, in a defensive whisper. “A beautiful country,” I said. “You have visited there?” he asked. I explained that I’d worked in Pakistan as a journalist and also travelled around as a tourist. Soon we were agreeing about the various attractions of Pakistan, and particularly of Lahore, his home city, and in no time we moved on to the subject of the war, its impact on Pakistan, and the mad brutality of the US response to 11 September.
Remember, this man was a New Yorker. He’d been driving a cab in the city for ten years. He was proud of his detailed knowledge of its road map. But he also had knowledge of other worlds – not only of Pakistan, and the role the US had played there, but also of Iraq, Palestine, Indonesia. He talked about how the US’s promotion of big-time heroin production along the Afghanistan border in the 80s had led to an outflow of heroin across south Asian and into the cities of America itself. “People in New York have been living with the problems caused by these policies for many years, they just don’t know it.”
I must have expressed over-forcefully my dismay and disgust with much of what I had seen and heard in New York, for he urged me to be patient. “These people,” he said, and he indicated the human swarm surrounding us in the mid-afternoon traffic, “have never experienced this kind of violence before. All they know is what is on their televisions and this tells them nothing about what has happened and why it has happened. Give them time. They will understand.”
Once again, that verse from Bullah Shah ran through my head: “Bullah, what do I know of myself? I am no believer in mosque or temple. I am not pure. I am not vile. I’m no Moses and I’m no Pharaoh. Bullah, what do I know of myself?”
