In Pakistan, ‘all wrongs make human rights’

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Globally, life expectancy is measured by the quality of nutrition and the healthcare facilities available. In Pakistan, however, the scale is a bit different. Here, if you are a Shia doctor or a young Baloch student, chances are that you will live half as long as someone who happens to be a Punjabi or a Sunni.Mohammed Hanif is lucky is this regard. He is a Punjabi, Sunni male – and he loves it!Speaking to a jam-packed session titled the “Human Rights and Wrong in Pakistan”, the acclaimed author said the Pakistani society suffered from some rare lingual ailment. “For the past 15 years, I have been asking who is behind the Shia killings in Pakistan. I never get a straight answer. As a society, we have somehow internalised the use of passive voice, which often muddles our thoughts about critical issues.”Asma Jahangir, the outspoken human rights lawyer, Aasim Sajjed Akhtar, a member of the Pakistan Worker’s Party, and Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, a US-based anthropologist also spoken at the event.Fiercely criticising the Protection of Pakistan Ordinance, a recently adopted anti-terror law, Jahangir said the government had claimed it was being brought against the extremists. “But we can see that they [state] are too keen to talk to the Taliban. The law was never meant against these forces. It will be used against writers and poets like Kishwer Naheed. Whatever hope there was [for human rights] has been shelved by this new law. Pakistan is now a bona fide security state,” she said.The speakers argued that the right wing in Pakistan was united and even enjoyed some support of the state. The progressive people are, however, scattered and the political space for them is shrinking by the day. So what is the way forward?Akhtar said leftist politics in Pakistan needed to be revived. “We can go on narrating the abuses being committed in Pakistan, but we do not have a coherent approach towards a solution.” He said what was required was a resistance movement against the forces of the state and its minions (read the right-wingers).Hanif said: “Those who are against the state’s silence over Shia killings or against its repression in Balochistan are equally complicit in their excesses, because we are paying the bills for the electric shocks the agencies are giving the Baloch youth. The state tells us the Baloch want to break up the country and we buy it.”Jahangir said the progressive people had to reach a consensus. “We have to draw a live somewhere. We have to ask ourselves this question: what is more important, the fundamental rights enshrined in the Pakistani constitution or those recommended by the Council of Islamic Ideology?”/129