TFT, Oct-10
Ejaz Haider
Our national shame
Recently, the BBC reported about a woman from Azad Kashmir who jumped into a river to commit suicide but was instead washed ashore on the Indian side. Predictably, she was arrested and jailed. While in jail and being tried, she was made pregnant by a jailer and gave birth to a girl. The Indian authorities have been trying to repatriate the woman for many years but Pakistan would not accept her. An Indian court, in a humane decision, asked the authorities to give her shelter and a monthly allowance until she is repatriated so she and her daughter can survive. But pray, why would Pakistan not accept her back?
The answer to this question is the collective shame of a country that might have gained much personal piety in the name of Islam in the past quarter century but in the bargain has lost even the last vestiges of national character. While the woman is from Azad Kashmir, her daughter, born in India, is an Indian. Is that why we would not have her back? Possibly. But more likely, we have another reason for not accepting her with the daughter: the child does not have a father and that means, under the Hudood Laws, that upon the woman’s arrival we will have to charge her with fornication unless she could bring four witnesses to prove that she was raped. The only way she can return is if she leaves the child in India – in which case, of course, there would be no case against her. Of course, we would still have the choice of charging her with committing suicide and/or illegally crossing over into India.
While she is desperate to return, she won’t do so without the child. One doesn’t have to be a mother to know why.
There is something so utterly inhumane about legislation based on a literalist exegesis of religion that it gets under one’s skin. Anyone who thinks that the ulema are amenable to a more humane view of things should watch Geo TV’s programme, Alim Online. It is, at best, a comedy of the grotesque. At worst, it is a moral strip-show where we present ourselves in public in all our naked glory. I am told the programme has great ratings. If that is true, and it is likely to be, I stand vindicated on my earlier point about the depths to which we have collectively sunk.
Just as in the case of the individual, it is the small things that inform of the character of a nation. The thought takes me far back into history to August 3, 216 BC. After the great battle of Cannae, in which some 50,000 Roman legionaries perished and about 10,000 were captured, with Roman Eagles at his feet, Hannibal stood on a knoll, overlooking the sun-warmed Adriatic. The Carthaginian general is reported to have summoned ten legionaries and asked them to go back to Rome. He had set a price for ransom and told the selected ten to go to the Fathers of the Senate and get them to pay up for the release of the captured legionaries. The ten were to leave under oath that they would return.
Once in Rome, where rumours of the disaster had already reached, the legionaries were given an audience with the Fathers. They were asked the reasons for the surrender, conduct unbecoming of Roman legionaries. Pleading on behalf of the captured legionaries, the spokesmen explained that only after the Roman soldiers were sure of the futility of fighting on that they had laid down arms. They begged that the Senate pay ransom so the fighters could be brought back and take to the field again. They said it was only appropriate at the time of such crisis, when even criminals were being freed and given arms, that Rome should have the services of these veterans. The Fathers were facing tremendous pressure.
But given the unyielding Roman code of warfare, the Fathers declined to pay Hannibal. Those who had surrendered would not be liberated. Nine of the ten legionaries proceeded back to inform the ‘Punic’ that nothing would be given him for those who had chosen to fall in his hands in broad daylight with weapons still in hands. One of the ten broke the oath and disappeared. When the Roman Senate came to know of his perfidy, he was searched out and sent back to Hannibal under guard.
Such was the Roman character. It was this that enabled the barbarians of Tiber to herald the Roman civilisation and dominate the then-known world with Pax Romana. Hannibal was good; too good, in fact, for the rigid battle tactics of Roman legionaries. With his lightening Numidian cavalry and his penchant for speed and surprise, he dominated the battlefield. The Battles of Lake Tresimeno and Cannae are a testimony to his grasp of battle tactics. But Carthage lost out to Rome in the end. In the long run, one man against Rome, even a man like the son of Hamilcar, could not overcome the national spirit of Romans. At the risk of oversimplification, I would say that Rome won the war the day it despatched the tenth man, who had broken the oath, under guard to Hannibal.
Compare that character with our lack of it and it should become clear why we crawl on our belly like the Biblical serpent and have charlatans as our rulers and religious scholars. Why indeed, despite being the most pusillanimous, miserable collection of humankind that ever breathed the air, our daily discourtesies, savageries and depravities remain matchless. Do we have enough character to accept the woman waiting to return to Pakistan along with her fatherless child? Or would we invoke our regressive legislation ostensibly to do ourselves proud as Muslims and, in the process, establish our credentials once again as barbarians? Let’s have an answer to that before we begin to talk about nationalism.