Pakistan's Minority Day at Frere Hall

Have you ever gotten news that just made you happy? Well I did last Friday when I opened the newspaper and was extremely pleasantly surprised to see the announcement of a Minority March – a pro-religious minority march patterned on the successful feminist Aurat March that happens in Frere Hall, Karachi and across Pakistani cities every 8 March.

It was great to see that a group of Pakistani minority activists plus the famous Sheema Kermani, had planned to hold a minority rights march ala the women’s march. Except this would be on 11 August, a day that was declared 13 years ago as Pakistan’s national minority day. This was in memory of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah (called by Pakistanis as the Quaid-e-Azam aka the great leader) making what is generally understood as a quite secular a speech on 11 August 1947. On that day Muhammad Ali Jinnah said, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

It was in rememberance of that statement in 2011 (and a lot of mobilisation and organisation amidst the mass murder of the Pakistani Taliban in the years prior to that, especially the murder of Governor Salmaan Taseer) which saw 11 August officially declared Pakistan’s national minority day. So the organisers of the Minority Rights March (who held this event last year) held a press conference at the Karachi Press club last week to announce that they would hold their protest at Frere Hall (the park and colonial era town hall) and march out from there. Sheema Kermani was at the presser and tried to give what became a rally a neutral position. Kermani pointed out that the Minority Rights March is not a political party or NGO when she said, “We are just an organic movement of people who have come together for a good cause. The majority can defend the minority.”

The march's list of demands - click on them to read them

The Hindu and Christian minority activists spoke about the broken promises of the Pakistani state and they also made a point that minorities from India, to Pakistan to Europe and North America have made: The minorities were the original inhabitants of the land. Whether its Hindus in Pakistan or Muslims from India, they are from the land and these countries are their countries as well.

As we got to 11 August, we heard that permission for the march had been taken away, but the organisers decided to go ahead. A Karachi bureaucrat said that there was a terrorist threat — it turned out to be the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan who specialise more in sectarian rioting, assassinations and blasphemy mobs rather than bombing.

So on 11 August 2024, the march happened at Frere Hall. It was supposed to be the starting point for the march, but it instead was restricted into just being a rally in the park. When I approached the location, I found that both the major streets that Frere Hall is bound by had shipping containers on them. The police had done that and I found that all entrances to Frere Hall’s park had been restricted except one. The police presence was heavy and visible all around the block that Frere Hall’s at.

As I saw the mix of regular police, Special Security Unit (essentially SWAT cops), riot cops and traffic police I had a hard time making out the poor volunteers for the minority march.

The massive police presence confirmed what I had heard — there were Islamist TLP counter-protestors afoot. They were the ones who didn’t want this march to take place, but the protest had begun with the rally in Frere Hall amidst the rain.

The rain made things...kind of strange and odd. I had to park in an incredibly unusual way, worrying about what would happen with the car if I left it where it did. Then I had to skirt around standing pools of water/sewage and get to the entrance all while it was not even raining, but drizzling, making everything slimy and disgusting. It really felt like between the right wing and the security forces of this country, we were going to have to wade through garbage to get basic liberal rights. Seriously, a minority march is not a particularly radical thing, but in Karachi on 11 August 2024, even having what turned out to be just a heavily policed rally for minority rights felt like a dicey affair. And the policing may have been loudly stated by the cops and government for “our protection” but considering the number of normal people who were trying to attend the march in Frere Hall, the police presence just felt intimidating and lent an oppressive air to the day’s proceedings. The police were visibly scattered throughout Frere Hall, even after you entered through the single metal detector-ed entrance.

However once I was in, it was good to see that the rally was happening. There were performances on stage that covered the horror of forced conversion of young minority girls and the lynching of people accused of blasphemy. This was all done in the style of South Asian street theatre. There were little flags which said “Stop forced conversions” and I took pictures and waved one of them. That, the plays on stage, the speeches and the crowd made the event really nice, while you were there. It was a benign middle class sort of affair. The march's list of demands was something that is important and needs to be implemented for the sake of minorities in Pakistan. If you discuss each of them, you can point to some horrible act of persecution in the past that lead to the creation of that demand.

The weather was overcast and threatened to rain. The real problem that was made apparent as I spent more time there amid the over-policed event was, that there was not going to be a march despite what the title of the event being “The Minority March.” I started asking the cops about the TLP presence and how far away it was. They either lied or pretended not to know anything. Typical cops. After being told, “I don’t know” twice by cops when I was asking how far away the fundamentalist protestors of the TLP were from the event, one policeman just lied and said they had dispersed. You can listen to what a cop says, but don’t believe what they say until you have proof or evidence of what these people are saying.

I spoke to one of the protestors and they gave me the details: The TLP were some distance away, the heavy police presence had kept them from getting to where the protest was and because of the presence of the TLP, the organisers of the march had restricted themselves to just holding a rally within Frere Hall, and not to march to the Press Club, or even outside the perimeter of Frere Hall, as originally planned. The attendee conceded that at least the Minority March had happened as a rally that day and stated that even having the event, as it was, had been an achievement. In light of the TLP threat, this person, who was a relative of one of the organisers of the march, seemed slightly relieved.

Attendants watching a street theatre play on people being oppressed by blasphemy allegations and religious oppression 

Between the crazed threats from the TLP and the security overkill that seemed to be posting forces from five to six police stations, there was some disappointment and a sense of subdued feelings at what should have been a polite, but fun political summer event. That just to have, what by 21st century standards would be a run off the mill affair — a rally for minority rights —  had, no thanks to fundamentalists and frankly, an administration and a city/province bureaucracy that doesn't want to deal with the problem of fundamentalists, become an affair where one had to hunt for a location to get off their vehicle, trudge through mud to a security point over a long distance, and only then could you enter the arena. No thanks to the threats faced, there would also be no public march through the streets, and so the event ends with people milling around and then walking or trudging back to their vehicles through that single security point. It's the fundamentalist TLP and their supporters and the PPP people who run Sindh and Karachi who are the problem.

"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

  - Office Space, talking about the TLP and their supporters in the public and the Pakistani state

A large poster showing the dangers minorities in Pakistan face as a Snakes and Ladders board game

While I was there, I hung around for nearly an hour and as the evening wore on, and the rain slowly came down, I decided to leave, but also check the TLP situation, after I exited Frere Hall. I drove around and found that traffic from Shahrah-e-Faisal (Karachi's main central road) past the abandoned Metropole Hotel, was choked, likely because of the TLP march that the cops were earlier denying. The entire street where Shahrah-e-Faisal terminates and leads to Frere Hall, had been blocked by shipping containers placed by the police. Later it was revealed by the Dawn newspaper that fundamentalists on motorcycles had been trying to probe the perimeter of the event by driving up and seeing if they could get past the cops or security. The traffic situation I saw after leaving the event, with the shipping containers, the traffic jams and everything and the news from the next day, justified the air of menace that seemed to pervade the perimeter and beyond of the event. The police lied, and the fundamentalists tried to be a pain. What should have been a celebratory affair, felt a little grim once you weren’t in it. The fundamentalists need to be exiled beyond the back of society. However, I’m at least glad that an in-person, physical event, a protest for minority rights in Pakistan was held.

Politics year at These Long Wars

You may have noticed there have been a lot of elections this year  - and for better or worse, they have effected the wars that have been going on. We're leaving judgement out until winter, but the effects of these elections on conflict has been for the worse. So we'll have to talk about them. I'm not the only person whose noticed how 2024 has been the year of elections across the globe.

Honest Government Ad | Democracy Ad — Banned in India

A decisive knockout blow to reactionaries and wannabe fascists was not delivered by many of these votes. However, the replacement of some egregious governments, especially in the UK and the prospect of a new, explicitly left-wing Prime Minister in France, are a good development. However, the fact that so many people around the world have voted has been globally for the better for democracy and freedom. It at least puts to bed one particularly crazed argument broached by the satirical Honest Government ad, that right-wingers and various wannabe dictatorial types have, which is that people don't care about voting or democracy. 

Some of the more strange things that happened this year were when Iran, Pakistan and Russia held votes, with the most disappointing and obviously faked "results" while the crazed government of Israel is avoiding having an election Then there's the fact that India is still lead by a man, in the person of Narendra Modi, who is still haunted by mentions of the riots and pogroms he oversaw 22 years ago. The first ex-president ever was convicted of a crime in the 248 year history of the United States of America.

Since I'll be talking about elections and politics in the rest of 2024, I'll talk about some other social and economic topics as well. These issues might have some political salience - they may also be personal opinions. Since I think it's relevant to talk about other stuff besides conflict for 2024 (I'll still mostly be talking about conflicts), I think it might be good to clear these matters as well.

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Corrupt Cold Wars

It's politics month at These Long Wars!

Since the election I've been meaning to dedicate a month talking about politics - just getting my views and opinions on current issues that aren't related to conflict out there and I think after a government's been installed after a frankly, badly rigged election, I think this might be a decent enough time to write these things down. We didn't get much of an option in February 2024 but the election and its results were worse than a person who wanted democracy to grow in Pakistan, could expect. I had started this blog with the expectation that arguments about democracy and dictatorship in Pakistan were behind us but after the February 2024 elections were rigged by the Pakistan Army against Imran Khan, the whole situation post 8 February reeks of the Musharraf era, when the military pushed out an authoritarian minded right-winger (Nawaz Sharif then, Imran Khan now) to take control of the whole country then, and effectively we are confronted with the same situation now, just through a few more civilian layers.

 

My modus operandi since 2010 has been covering terrorist attacks in Pakistan via my blog. Frankly, the Pakistan government would prefer that attention not be drawn to them, but that’s because their incompetence and collusion in cases has caused these attacks to break out. The reality is, I would prefer to cover the peaceful end of the conflicts Pakistan is involved with internally and externally. But since the Pakistan Army has a chokehold on Pakistani politics and much of Pakistan’s political elite cannot imagine, or would prefer not to take responsibility for Pakistan’s security, the violence is not going to completely go away because that would be unfavorable to the Pakistan Army’s position as a perpetual nuisance in Pakistani politics.

However, that’s just my personal views on Pakistani political violence and terrorism. Pakistani politics has degenerated further this year, making the Pakistan Army’s position stronger, 16 years after the Musharraf dictatorship was ousted. The Army’s position has been strengthened but this has also made politics more volatile. This has come to the point where political violence can (and has) broken out because of the destabilisations caused by the Pakistan Army blocking democratic consolidation in the country.

You may have noticed I don't discuss politics that much. I think that talking about Pakistani politics on a regular basis, day in and day out, taxes the sanity of a person. For one thing, nothing materially changes, and the absurdity and enforced austerity, both material and spiritual of Pakistani politics, just taxes you if you discuss it regularly. This is why I haven’t started some stupid podcast or Youtube channel that tracks Pakistani politics. This stuff is insane and more like professional wrestling, with the real deals being done behind backdoors. However, surprise, surprise, elections have come to have significance in Pakistan. But the rightwing, which is 80% of the state and the politics, hates this.

People who discuss Pakistani politics are not normal. It is distorted by the military and intelligence, it acquires a weird sheen and behaviour, and I have realised that weirdness works in favour of the military and the spies (and in other spy or police derived politics) because it alienates regular people and that would hurt the people they are against. At least when you cover a terrorist attack, the casualties make a material difference from before and after the attack.

Pakistani politics is in such a bad place that any reactionary should love it. And they do, by regularly engaging with it to make it more deadly and reactionary. That is not what I am here for.

I also need to discuss society and demographics as well. Don't worry - I mean demographics in the purely census terms. Things like infant mortality, maternal mortality and education rates, etc. One of the reasons Pakistan’s population has continued to shoot up is because this country continues to have a maternal and infant mortality rate that is among the highest in Asia (CHECK) And this necessitates poor people in Pakistan to have a large number of children so that they survive infancy. Of course so many are surviving but the disastrous part of my country’s politics and vicious non-priorities is that it never tackled its third world rate of infant and maternal mortality effectively. The result is that if you are below a certain income level the chances of the survival of your baby and the mother declines catastrophically. This is a consequence of Pakistan’s politicians never, ever tackling population growth issues and especially their lack of tackling maternal and infant mortality – consequently, too many dead mothers and babies.

The Pakistan Army keeps the Balochistan Insurgency going

The Baloch nationalist parties, from across all of the ethnicities there, called for a general strike on 18 February across the province. Balochistan went on strike against Pakistan's election results in the provine.

Pakistan's political leadership needs to quickly stand up a coalition government

Pakistan's political leadership has a chance to re-calibrate the state and enforce civilian supremacy if they unite. The overwhelming turnout of the Pakistani voter has handed the civilian leadership of the country a historic chance to push back against the generals. 

The election of 2024 was supposed to happen in 2023. After Imran Khan's government was removed in a vote of no confidence in 2002, after the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) along with some smaller parties joined together in the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) to oust Imran's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government. The PDM saw the chance to take control of the government and they did, with former three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's brother Shahbaz Sharif becoming the new Premier of Pakistan after Imran Khan. This guy was and is, a crazy extremist and he lived up to the reputation he had gathered as the manic Chief Minister of Pakistan's largest province, Punjab. He spent a week complaining about blasphemy against Islam in Sweden (a statement would have been enough) while causing back breaking inflation in Pakistan by implementing an IMF plan that saw oil prices double along with the cost of everything else in the country. Shahbaz was notorious during his stints as Chief Minister of Punjab for having terrorists from Islamic extremist groups killed extra-judicially by the Punjab police. This guy was (and is) nuts. Maybe all of this is why when his family's party went to the polls on Thursday, the entire country just seemed to kick his brother's party in the teeth.

Source: Al Jazeera.

The Imran Khan government was called a hybrid regime because it was brought into power by the Army. Hopes that the PDM government of Shahbaz Sharif would prove itself as a re-assertion of some actual democracy were dashed when it became clear that the extra-judicial disappearances and tortures would continue. This hybridity was enforced by Shahbaz's strange and maniacal behaviour along with his and his party and allies willingness to be used as a cover by the Pakistan Army to institute un-popular structural adjustments by the IMF and the World Bank that doubled prices in the second half of 2022 and through 2023. The floods in August 2022 made things worse. The consequences of all this was felt in the spring of 2023 when Imran Khan and his party suicide bombed the constitutional structre of Pakistan by rioting across the country and attacking Army bases when now ex-PM Imran Khan was faced with his first arrest. This stupid Pakistani reboot of the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol gave the Army carte blanche to start not just arresting, but kidnapping and torturing members of Imran Khan's party, disappearing them into military dungeons and doing this especially to the leadership of the party. Once the PTI attacked Pakistan Army bases (frankly, more like rioted at their entrances) the military used this to declare open season on the PTI, treated the whole party as a threat to the Pakistan Army and dismantled the above-ground manifestations of the party. This lead to multiple arrests of the leadership and countless cases against Imran Khan. The PDM went along with this madcap and extra-constitutional response by the army and cemented itself as a second manifestation of a hybrid regime.

When Shahbaz Sharif stepped down in August 2023 for the interim government to hold elections, instead of a normal campaign period, we were confronted by the third manifestation of a hybrid regime. This got bad very quickly, it's still around like a bad STD and it tried to pretend it was a real government. The "interim government" delayed the elections by another three months, instead of holding the vote by August as it was constitutionally required. This bending of the constitution, along with the lack of provincial government that Khyeber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab have suffered from for a year have left the country in a severe case of a sort of constitutional drift. That interim government was stuffed with clowns from the puppet government the Pakistan Army had created to run Balochistan through a fake party in 2018, as they strong-armed Imran Khan into the centre. They ran Pakistan as disastrously for six months as they had Balochistan for five years. The economy nose-dived, terrorism rose and they tried to ethnically cleanse Afghan refugees from Pakistan to pressure the Afghan Taliban and in lieu of actually having a counter-terrorism plan where one part of the government doesn't go chasing terrorists while another part of the Pakistan Army is propping up fundamentalists. The arrests and pre-poll rigging against the PTI's members and leaders continued while the media continued to be pushed against the wall and enforced disappearances and torture continued to be used as instruments of policy and governance. PTI election candidates would turn up to register and they would be arrested. The most insane and egregious part of this pre-poll rigging, that will be discussed in history book, is how PTI candidates were denied a single unified symbol (for example the PPP has an arrow and the PML-N has a tiger). While every PPP or PML-N candidate across the country has an arrow or a tiger next to their name, the PTI was effectively de-registered as a party and if it's candidates hadn't been tortured or bribed to jump ship to another party, the remaining candidates of the PTI were forced to run as "indpendents" with their own separate symbols across every single constituency. So rather than vote for a cricket bat, these "independents" (effectively PTI) ran with strange symbols like pans, beds, ceiling fans, drums, etc. 

The interim "government" also spent half of its six months, not announcing an election date with the day of the vote being subject to a vicious rumour mongering campaign that alleged it would be delayed. The result was confusion and an election campaign that did not get off the ground until one month before the voting started. But then people voted on 8 February and it created the crisis we are expriencing now.

Suddenly, a 100 "independents" have been elected to parliament, by an angered PTI voter base that coordinated voting across mobile phones and the internet and a bunch of, dare I say it, Pakistani swing voters, who didn't want their democracy taken away by the generals.

Polling staff count ballots after voting ends in Hyderabad. Source: BBC

At this stage, with the PML-N coming in second and the PPP third, when no one party has reached a majority so a coalition will have to be formed. The serious advice that's coming in is telling the PML-N and PPP to sort of go ahead with, frankly, in some sense the now successful Army plan to have the PML-N in government by creating a coalition. This coalition needs to grow the economy, keep the army of its back and try to work for some kind of civilian supremacy. The hybridity of Pakistan's system has to be exorcised in one way or another. Frankly, I would prefer immediate civilian supremacy.

The messing with Pakistan's politics since 2017, especially the imposition of what have now been three back to back hybrid regimes has lead Pakistan to a social, political, economic and security disaster. All that's left is military disaster (and you can make a case that's happened in Balochistan) and you can basically make a case for full state failure at that point. The path out of this is a coalition that focuses on growing the economy and fixing Pakistan's economic problems. The voters were the heroes on 8 February and provided the people in power a way out by showing up and demonstrating a full democracy is what they care about, with a nearly 50% participation rate in the country that now has the fifth largest population in the world (our demographic explosion is a discussion for a different day).

To anyone who is sarcastic about Pakistan holding elections, I would remind them that tens of millions of people voted to try and make their voice heard in government. Frankly, considering the history of Pakistani democracy, the very act of holding these elections was important, has moved us forward and structurally changed politics inside Pakistan.

Source: Al Jazeera.

If anyone wants to talk about an extreme military option for the Pakistan Army to reassert power over the country, there is the example of Burma and Sudan to contemplate, where the state (and army) is falling apart in the face of a pro-democracy insurgency and where the state already broke up after mass oppression over a decade ago, the elite haven't learnt a lesson and are going to go break something further again. The Pakistan Army still has all its cards and just be keeping quiet it can keep them. Despite being in the same region (and sharing a former part of Pakistan with it) the Pakistan Army should also know when it's lost and not proceed with the Burma Progression.

Frankly, the Pakistan Army and especially its high command has demonstrated gross incompetence. General Bajwa created project Imran Khan and it blew up in his face. He was encouraged to do this from abroad, especially from European countries, but launching Imran Khan was a domestic Pakistan Army initiative to try and carve space away from the political parties that had signed the charter of democracy. Then when it blew up, the current leadership under General Asim Munir collaborated with a second hybrid regime and created a third one, while intensifying the oppression experienced in Balochistan and spreading it to the rest of the country. That has now blown up in their face.

The Pakistan Army and its stooges in the interim government spent a year making a mockery of democracy and now with warnings poring in from the world's foreign offices, it has had a mockery made of itself and Pakistan.

The problem is that Pakistan and especially the Pakistan Army never loses an opportunity to lose an opportunity. However the generals are now working in a more restricted landscape and they need to be further turfed out of policy making. If nothing else, the voters have shown they want this.