If it is true that current events foreshadow the future, it is truer still that the shadows of the past stalk our present. Consider the nexus between the past, present and future.
Ahsan Iqbal, the interior minister, was shot and wounded. The would-be assassin belongs to the Tehreek Labaiq Ya Rasool Allah which has accused him of blasphemy. The TLYR is one of the myriad extremist organisations that have sprouted up since a Miltablishment dictator, General Zia ul Haq, thrust “militant jihadist Islam” into Pakistani politics in the 1980s and irrevocably instilled intolerance, fear, and violence in the heart of state and society. The irony of Mr Ahsan’s situation has been brilliantly captured by Khaled Ahmed, a courageous witness to history, which is worth quoting in full:
“Ahsan Iqbal, who narrowly escaped death at the hands of a ‘blasphemy killer’ came from a family that actually forced Pakistan under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the early 1990s to set the ‘death sentence’ as the minimum penalty for an insult to the Holy Prophet (pbuh). His mother Apa Nisar Fatima – daughter of a famous Ahrar Party member from Jallundhar devoted to the cause of punishing blasphemers – was actually responsible for the promulgation of the current anti-blasphemy law that has targeted Christians whose gathering Mr Ahsan was attending in his constituency of Narowal when he was fired upon for being a blasphemer.
“Apa Nisar Fatima was a Jamaat-e-Islami member of parliament in 1986 when she took up the cause of blasphemy. Chief Reporter Ansar Abbasi wrote (in Daily Jang of 12 January 2011) that he and a number of conservative lawyers in Lahore got together to file a petition in 1984 at the Federal Shariat Court asking for a law against insults to the Holy Prophet (pbuh). In July 1984, a lady lawyer (read Asma Jahangir), whose husband was an industrialist, had ‘allegedly’ insulted the Holy Prophet in a speech in Islamabad.
“On this Apa Nisar Fatima raised the issue in parliament and presented the infamous Bill about 295-C of the Penal Code. It was accepted by MNAs but the Law Minister, Iqbal Ahmad Khan, changed the text at the last minute to assign ‘death or life’ as punishment for blasphemy. Thereupon, Apa Nisar Fatima took the matter back to the Federal Shariat Court saying that punishment for blasphemy as ‘hadd’ (mentioned in the Quran) could not be less than death.
“The hearing of the case started on the first of April (sic!) 1987. Advocates-General from the provinces agreed with the petition and their lordships the judges agreed to have death as the only punishment. Dr Tahirul Qadri held that even evidence of intention was not required before quickly killing the blasphemer. The Court gave the government till 1991 to amend the Penal Code Section 295-C. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wanted to challenge the verdict but desisted after a message was sent to him about how the people might react.”
Here, in a nutshell, are all the main actors of the past, huddled in the present, to create violence and mayhem in the future.
Take another sore point in the present. The Miltablishment is angry at Nawaz Sharif for challenging its writ. And why not, because he is, let’s not forget, a child of the Miltablishment. But now the Miltablishment is nurturing Imran Khan as an antidote to Nawaz Sharif by engineering a revolt of Southern Punjabis from the PMLN and shoving them into the PTI to shore up Imran’s chances of becoming Prime Minister. What is in store in the future for their currently budding relationship, however, can be gauged from Khan’s remark attributing the rigged elections of 2013 to General Ashfaq Kayani, an earlier army chief.
That’s not all. It has now been revealed that General Kayani was the hidden hand behind the Lawyers Movement, first to get rid of General Pervez Musharraf and install himself in his place, then to hoist Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry as Chief Justice of Pakistan to blackmail President Asif Zardari into giving him an extension in service. One consequence of such past engineering is the current disqualification of Nawaz Sharif as prime minister at the hands of an unaccountable and self-righteous Supreme Court. But let us not forget that it was the same Nawaz Sharif who conspired with Generals Asad Durrani and Mirza Aslam Beg, first to oust Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1990 and then in the Mehran Bank affair to steal the 1990 election from her. Is it any coincidence, therefore, that the SC’s recent bid to dust off the Asghar Khan case relating to Mehran Bank in 1991 may turn more on trying the errant generals for financial misappropriation rather than conspiracy and treason.
The Miltablishment has engineered Prime Ministers galore in the past and then scuttled them one by one when they couldn’t abide by their Rules of the Game. Imran Khan’s fate will be no different. But the cost to Pakistan will continue to mount as the past bedevils the present and threatens the future.