On these very pages over the past week, a few writers have highlighted the disparity in response to two separate events — Israeli aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, and mob violence against Ahmadis in Gujranwala. This much-needed commentary correctly emphasises the hypocrisy visible in societal outrage, and the contradictory standard the public holds for violent acts against what is already a marginalised, and thoroughly ostracised community.
What is still needed though is an explanation for why public/political reactions come out looking this skewed, this often.
What determines the amount of public attention towards a particular tragedy in Pakistan? What factors decide which community is worthy of sympathy and which deserves cold indifference?
On the issue of violence in Gaza, the aggressor state, Israel, occupies a larger-than-life presence within the public imagination in Pakistan. Part of this comes from the fact that the state vocally props up a particular position on Israel — whether it’s on international platforms like the UN, where their line is now largely pro-Muslim Ummah and hence pro-Palestine, or whether it’s through official documentation, like a passport, on which the state of Israel simply vanishes.
How the state views a particular issue, or a particular group, becomes a first-level determinant of the public’s moral compass.
At the other end of the outrage spectrum, the impact of the state’s position is considerably darker. In a self-professed Islamic country, the Ahmadis are a constitutionally declared minority. Further coupled with the Second Amendment provision are extreme penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, both of which reaffirm the state’s official discrimination against this particular community.
Hence, how the state views a particular issue, or a particular group, becomes a first-level determinant of the public’s moral compass. What happens subsequently is that official positions take on a life of their own within society. A contemporary example from within the Israel-Palestine conflict is hyperbole-loving TV anchors, analysts, and televangelists characterising Israel as one of the three principle enemies of Pakistan; Zionists as a scheming cabal ruling the world; and Jews as the antagonists in an eternal battle against Muslims.
These aren’t official positions in the legal sense of the term (though it’s safe to assume many officers of the state do ascribe to them). What they do act as though are channels of bringing the issue much closer to home, within the Pakistani public conscience, via a simplistic cultural-religious understanding.
Like media personalities, religious political parties, and civil society groups, have incentives to pursue certain causes, delineate certain public positions, and perpetuate silence on some atrocities.
For example, the entire identity and worldview of Pakistan’s largest, (and since the ’90s, only properly functioning) student organisation — the Islami Jamiat Tulaba — is built on pan-Islamic causes. Vast numbers of students at higher education institutes across the country are recruited and then schooled into a particular religion-infused morality over particular causes.
Further down at the neighbourhood level, mosques belonging to all denominations have invoked the plight of Palestinian Muslims since as long as one can remember. It is this timeless prayer for ‘Falasteen ke musalman’ that has played such an instrumental role in making the Palestine conflict a household subject, and thus a national cause.
On the other hand, the state’s official position on Ahmadis translates into an exclusionary structure at the societal level, and one that ensures little to no outrage over acts of discrimination or violence.
Religious groups and other powerbrokers — using the space the state has so openly granted them — actively discriminate against Ahmadis in public life, and engage either in incitement, or carry out acts of violence. Hate literature, often with concocted stories about conspiracies against Islam, is disseminated at street corners, in mosques, and even at traffic lights as part of a dehumanising campaign.
To top it all, the country is currently witness to an entire movement — one that generates large amounts of funding — that exists solely for the purpose of marginalising this particular subset of the population. And because the entire apparatus of discrimination is violent, law-enforcement agencies or national-level politicians are either too desensitised already, or too wary to take up this cause, for fear of being killed and/or portrayed as anti-Islam.
Essentially then, there are two historical determinants of why we see such staggeringly different levels of outrage between Gaza and Gujranwala. The first is the state’s official position over time, which includes the legal framework it functions under, and the rhetoric it employs. In the case of Gaza, the government was quick and loud to condemn Israeli aggression, and even pledged monetary support for the Muslims of Palestine. In the case of Gujranwala, it maintains a scared distance, and a stony silence.
The second determinant is the way societal groups perpetuate ideological agendas, and the way they take state-sanctioned positions to their (logical) extremes. In the case of Gaza, Islamic groups and most mainstream political parties in Pakistan have a long history of processing and disseminating the Israel-Palestine conflict in religious terms. Anti-Israel (often conflated as anti-Jewish) sentiment is a countrywide staple, and often dots regular, everyday conversations. Outrage over such indiscriminate violence by the Israeli Defence Forces, thus, is an almost natural reaction within the Pakistani polity.
Outrage over a violent mob in Gujranwala, though, will never come even close to the same levels simply because the violence is itself the product of a successful, countrywide ideological campaign. This same campaign actively ensures that any minor tendency to empathise with this particular community is quashed, either through spreading more hate-speech, or through more violence.
Going with the current state of affairs, therefore, it seems quite predictable that incidents like Gaza will always trump incidents like Gujranwala on the outrage and condemnation front.
