By MOHSIN HAMID
LAHORE, Pakistan
ON Monday, my mother's and sister's eye doctor was assassinated. He
was a Shiite. He was shot six times while driving to drop his son off
at school. His son, age 12, was executed with a single shot to the
head.
Tuesday, I attended a protest in front of the Governor's House in
Lahore demanding that more be done to protect Pakistan's Shiites from
sectarian extremists. These extremists are responsible for
increasingly frequent attacks, including bombings this year that
killed more than 200 people, most of them Hazara Shiites, in the city
of Quetta.
As I stood in the anguished crowd in Lahore, similar protests were
being held throughout Pakistan. Roads were shut. Demonstrators blocked
access to airports. My father was trapped in one for the evening, yet
he said most of his fellow travelers bore the delay without anger.
They sympathized with the protesters' objectives.
Minority persecution is a common notion around the world, bringing to
mind the treatment of African-Americans in the United States, for
example, or Arab immigrants in Europe. In Pakistan, though, the
situation is more unusual: those persecuted as minorities collectively
constitute a vast majority.
A filmmaker I know who has relatives in the Ahmadi sect told me that
her family's graves in Lahore had been defaced, because Ahmadis are
regarded as apostates. A Baluch friend said it was difficult to take
Punjabi visitors with him to Baluchistan, because there is so much
local anger there at violence toward the Baluch. An acquaintance of
mine, a Pakistani Hindu, once got angry when I answered the question
"how are things?" with the word "fine" — because things so obviously
aren't. And Pakistani Christians have borne the brunt of arrests under
the country's blasphemy law; a governor of my province was
assassinated for trying to repeal it.
What then is the status of the country's majority? In Pakistan, there
is no such thing. Punjab is the most populous province, but its
roughly 100 million people are divided by language, religious sect,
outlook and gender. Sunni Muslims represent Pakistan's most populous
faith, but it's dangerous to be the wrong kind of Sunni. Sunnis are
regularly killed for being open to the new ways of the West, or for
adhering to the old traditions of the Indian subcontinent, for being
liberal, for being mystical, for being in politics, the army or the
police, or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
At the heart of Pakistan's troubles is the celebration of the
militant. Whether fighting in Afghanistan, or Kashmir, or at home,
this deadly figure has been elevated to heroic status: willing to make
the ultimate sacrifice, able to win the ultimate victory, selfless,
noble. Yet as tens of thousands of Pakistanis die at the hands of such
heroes, as tens of millions of Pakistanis go about their lives in
daily fear of them, a recalibration is being demanded. The need of the
hour, of the year, of the generation, is peace.
Pakistan is in the grips of militancy because of its fraught
relationship with India, with which it has fought three wars and
innumerable skirmishes since the countries separated in 1947.
Militants were cultivated as an equalizer, to make Pakistan safer
against a much larger foe. But they have done the opposite, killing
Pakistanis at home and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic
conflicts abroad.
Normalizing relations with India could help starve Pakistani militancy
of oxygen. So it is significant that the prospects for peace between
the two nuclear-armed countries look better than they have in some
time.
India and Pakistan share a lengthy land border, but they might as well
be on separate continents, so limited is their trade with each other
and the commingling of their people. Visas, traditionally hard to get,
restricted to specific cities and burdened with onerous requirements
to report to the local police, are becoming more flexible for business
travelers and older citizens. Trade is also picking up. A pulp
manufacturer in Pakistani Punjab, for example, told me he had
identified a paper mill in Indian Punjab that could purchase his
factory's entire output.
These openings could be the first cracks in a dam that holds back a
flood of interaction. Whenever I go to New Delhi, many I meet are
eager to visit Lahore. Home to roughly a combined 25 million people,
the cities are not much more than half an hour apart by plane, and yet
they are linked by only two flights a week.
Cultural connections are increasing, too. Indian films dominate at
Pakistani cinemas, and Indian songs play at Pakistani weddings. Now
Pakistanis are making inroads in the opposite direction. Pakistani
actors have appeared as Bollywood leads and on Indian reality TV.
Pakistani contemporary art is being snapped up by Indian buyers. And
New Delhi is the publishing center for the current crop of Pakistani
English-language fiction.
A major constraint the two countries have faced in normalizing
relations has been the power of security hawks on both sides, and
especially in Pakistan. But even in this domain we might be seeing an
improvement. The new official doctrine of the Pakistani Army for the
first time identifies internal militants, rather than India, as the
country's No. 1 threat. And Pakistan has just completed an
unprecedented five years under a single elected government. This year,
it will be holding elections in which the largest parties all agree
that peace with India is essential.
Peace with India or, rather, increasingly normal neighborly relations,
offers the best chance for Pakistan to succeed in dismantling its cult
of militancy. Pakistan's extremists, of course, understand this, and
so we can expect to see, as we have in the past, attempts to scupper
progress through cross-border violence. They will try to goad India
into retaliating and thereby giving them what serves them best: a
state of frozen, impermeable hostility.
They may well succeed. For there is a disturbing rise of hyperbolic
nationalism among India's prickly emerging middle class, and the
Indian media is quick to stoke the fires. The explosion of popular
rage in India after a recent military exchange, in which soldiers on
both sides of the border were killed, is an indicator of the danger.
So it is important now to prepare the public in both countries for an
extremist outrage, which may well originate in Pakistan, and for the
self-defeating calls for an extreme response, which are likely to be
heard in India. Such confrontations have always derailed peace in the
past. They must not be allowed to do so again. In the tricky months
ahead, as India and Pakistan reconnect after decades of virtual
embargo, those of us who believe in peace should regard extremist
provocations not as barriers to our success but, perversely, as signs
that we are succeeding.
Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels "The Reluctant
Fundamentalist" and the forthcoming "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising
Asia."
NYT
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