Lynching Wrongfulness
(Naseer Ahmed)
Lynching is one of the ugliest features of evil regimes and evil cultures. It happens in the background of prejudice and hatred and it reaches to its peak under a system of lynch laws. In the United States, the lynch mob incidents reached to its peak under Jim Crow laws which basically cancelled the emancipation deal for the Black American achieved after the American Civil war.
That is with most laws that undermine the democratic nature of a state. The lynch laws are basically a kind of licence to the hate gangs to murder the most vulnerable in a pack. Whenever a state through its laws denies the equality of all citizens before law, it encourages the formation of lynch mobs.
There are many kind of prejudices which have been encouraged by so many states and societies which has resulted in lynching of the fellow citizens. The moment the leaders of a state and a society send this hate message against a community, a group or an individual, the lynch mobs begin to form to express their hatred against whoever they dislike.
A Mass Communication student has been lynched a mob in Mardan University over blasphemy accusations. This lynching does not come out of nowhere. There is a witch hunting campaign against liberal citizens launched by the usual agents and supported by the usual culprits.
The incident could be spontaneous or planned but a campaign is there where some judges weep while hearing a case aiming at public approval for their piety, people are abducted for disrespect to religion, people are threatened for their opinions and where a casual remark about anything could result in a death sentence. When a cultural leadership uses hatred for money or ratings, it becomes a model for anybody who wants to be rich and popular.
We are a democracy but we look like some kind of spiritual democracy, a racist democracy or people’s democracy where it is extremely easy to suspend reason, compassion, love, law, ethics, due process, and decency for an argument over a cup of tea.
A university as a lynch mob scene is a disgrace to everybody who has an iota of respect for knowledge and truth. Alas, we have a terrible history of having our universities as killing field of our academics and students from Dhaka University to Punjab University.
We have a democratic government and opposition which bow down to the military courts quite eagerly but they don’t have this spine and spirit to do something about this murdering disrespect to our democratic laws. And without any respect to our democratic laws, we are a lynch mob lynching each other over just accusations, allegations and suspicions.
The other day, our news columns were full of disgust and revulsion against a Hindu nationalist lynch mob in India which murdered a man over suspicions of cow smuggling. Here, a Muslim nationalist’s lynch mob murders a man over suspicion in a University. At least, we should make it sure that we have some moral high ground before pointing our fingers at other. Like India, the approval of some boring robot like creatures is enough for moral high ground. The kind of moral high ground that does need any evidence is a fiery speech that provokes people to commit heinous crimes. It is almost impossible to have even a semblance of civil, civic, citizen and civilization with such blood curdling sermons.
There is too much talk about saving the souls in Pakistan. So many saints are permanently busy in saving our souls.Even a social media page might make somebody who has lost his Remotva ( remote, a reference to an Indian movie about a good natured alien) quite ashamed of his sins among such angelic people.But it takes a five minute chat to an independent observer to see the horrors of this perpetual piety parade.
In the end, if we are honest, our souls have been lynched long ago. It is just this formality of horrible physical pain that needs to be done. It would come as a lynch mob, as a terrorist attack, as a disease caused by some factory or plant, as a car driven by some ignorant driver or as a state campaign of cleansing the sacred land from the impure and the undesirable.
Perhaps, we still have this time to save our souls and bodies. That means a genuine commitment to democracy, human rights and rule of democratic law. Perhaps, we have lost this ability not to think and act like a gangster. I am no existentialist and I never overdo this choice thing but at this moment we ,as individuals and as nation have this choice to make. What we want to become, citizens or gangsters?Our future depends on this choice.