“The United States has a special responsibility vis-à-vis Pakistan”: An Interview with Farahnaz Ispahani

Wilson Center
23 January, 2016

Farahnaz Ispahani, a public policy scholar at the Woodraw Wilson Center in Washington, is a former member of Pakistan’s parliament and served as the media advisor of the erstwhile president Asif Ali Zardari. Before she became an active participant in the country’s politics through the Pakistan’s People’s Party, Ispahani spent two decades in print and broadcast journalism, working with organisations such as the networks ABC and CNN in the United States of America. In 2012, the magazine Foreign Policy named her in its list of the top 100 global thinkers. Last year, Ispahani published her book, Purifying The Land of the Pure, which focuses on the state of religious minorities in Pakistan. The book analyses the policies of Pakistan towards its minorities while attempting to explore the genesis of the country. It also scrutinises the change in the ideology of Pakistan from the pluralist country that it had been envisioned as, to the purely Sunni-Islamic nation it is now.

On 18 January 2016, Nikita Saxena, the web editor of The Caravan, met Ispahani in Delhi. During the conversation, Ispahani spoke about the decreasing minority population in Pakistan, the role of the US in creating militias within the country, and the way forward for a state that she believes is committing “slow genocide.”

Nikita Saxena: The percentage of non-muslims in Pakistan has reduced significantly since its formation in 1947. What do you think has led to this decrease?

Farahnaz Ispahani:  In my book, I have demonstrated the four stages of intolerance in Pakistan. Stage one is Muslimisation. This was the massive decline in the Hindu and Sikh population from 1947 to 1951 during and after partition, because of which Pakistan’s demographic became primarily Muslim. Stage two is what I call Islamic identity, in which state-sponsored textbooks rejected pluralism. This was the start of changing and shaping the mindsets of the young into this ideology of Pakistan. It was an attempt to forge a Pakistani identity purely on the basis of Islam. Stage three is Islamisation. This was achieved through legislation, by attempting to make the country’s laws more Islamic. It resulted in a legal framework against minorities from 1974 to 1988. This included the law that was passed during the regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto [the prime minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977] in 1974 that designated Ahmedis as non-Muslims and minorities [The Ahmadis consider themselves Muslim but their beliefs are deemed by orthodox Muslims as falling outside the tenets of Islam]. After that was Muhammed Zia-ul-Haq [The Pakistani general who served as the country’s sixth president starting 1978, after declaring martial law in 1977] with all his major Islamisation laws including the blasphemy law. Stage four is what I call militant hostility. This is what we are seeing today: terrorism and organised violence starting from Zia to present-day.

NS: Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was himself a Shia—now declared "non-muslim" in Pakistan. Jinnah propagated the idea of a Pakistan as a state that embraced its plurality. How did the country’s Islamisation begin, despite its relatively secular roots?

FI: In the first year of Pakistan’s life, Mr Jinnah was very ill and dying. Soon after, those of the bureaucrats and politicians, who were religious purists, needed something to glue themselves to power. Most of them had not come from the landmass of the new country of Pakistan, because most of them had come from what became Indian regions post-Partition. They did not, as politicians and bureaucrats, have a natural political constituency. They didn’t have voters, they didn’t have ancestral villages, they didn’t have the local languages of Sindhi, any of the Baloch languages, or Pashto. What ended up happening was that they turned back to the “Islam is in danger,” that “Pakistan is equal to Islam” and “Islam is equal to Pakistan” trope.

NS: You mentioned the blasphemy laws that Zia had introduced during his reign. Why has no political party or politician been able to reverse these laws even though they are criticised widely?

FI: When you start changing the country, the way that people think and their mindsets, you mix religion and politics. When you break down that wall between the state, the mandir, the church and the mosque, you end up putting yourself in a situation which is very hard to reverse. Religion is very emotive. Pakistan’s people have, over the years, been told through the media and their textbooks that their first identity is as a Muslim, and so it becomes very difficult to do anything about these laws. Many who stood up, and tried to speak about amending the blasphemy laws have ended up giving their lives. You see that in the case of [the governer of the Punjab province] Shaheed Salman Taseer, and in the case of our first federal minorities minister—who was Christian—and my colleague in parliament, Shahbaz Bhatti, and many, many other people who are known and unknown outside our country.

NS: Is the fear of persecution all that stops the government from changing these laws or is it also a lack of political will?

FI: Of course there is a lack of political will. When you end up in a situation where the majority—I wouldn’t say the majority, I would say the very violent and vociferous minority—is armed, and dangerous, that makes politicians pause. It’s very easy to talk about political will when you’re not in politics. But in Pakistan, our first democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged. Our next four elected prime ministers [Zulfikar’s daughter Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who had two separate terms each] were all thrown out of office by the military—Benazir one, Nawaz one, Benazir two, Nawaz two—so not one of them could end their terms. Benazir tried in her first term, and campaigned against Zia on turning back the Islamisation of Pakistan. She specifically focused on the Hudood laws, which effected women. The combination of the military and the clergy got rid of her very quickly.

Tell me about political will. When our government decided to prosecute Mumtaz Qadri [a former police bodyguard] for the murder of our governer Salman Taseer, it was difficult to find a government prosecutor willing to take the case. The judge who gave the verdict against Qadri had to be whisked out of the country along with his entire family.

NS: You have suggested that the United States State Department should use its authority to declare Pakistan “a country of particular concern.” This designation, according to the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act of the United States must be applied to any nation that “engages in or tolerates particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”

FI: For many years now, this autonomous body called the USCIRF—United States Commission on International Religious Freedom —has been putting Pakistan on top of the list of countries that invoke most concern for religious freedom. Every year, it sends its findings to the US State department and every year, the US state department waters down its report on Pakistan. I am not talking in terms of wanting a foreign country to insert themselves into domestic politics. But I do feel that it is time for the United States, which has been the biggest provider of military arms and the biggest supporter of the Pakistan military to stand up perhaps for the people of Pakistan, for the religious minorities in Pakistan and for civil society in Pakistan. You can’t just talk this big talk about being the world’s greatest democracy when this is what are you exporting.

I do feel that the United States has a special responsibility vis-à-vis Pakistan because they have supported every single military dictator. During the reign of General Zia-ul-Haq, where did all the militias and all the funding for Pakistan to take the role of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan come from? Where did the madrasas come from? Saudi Arabia. Where did Wahabi Islam come from? Saudi Arabia. Where did the guns and training come from? The United States of America. So is there no sense of responsibility? If you’re going to interfere in our domestic politics, if you have had a history of upholding these very unjust laws, and if you have turned a blind eye to all of Zia’s Islamisation, I feel you owe us something.

NS: In your book, you mention the case of Sultan BashiruddinMahmood, who tried to teach “Islamic science,” a concept openly embraced by Zia-ul-Haq. Mahmood, you note, was a nuclear engineer who proposed nurturing the power of jinn mentioned in the Quran to solve the world’s energy shortage. Is this an instance of Pakistan's education system reflecting the state’s Islamisation, and is the influence still as clearly visible?

FI: Absolutely. The other thing is, not just the thinking of this man, but the fact that he was in such a senior position. He was not dismissed as a crackpot, he was not dismissed as a marginal figure, this man was in an important position. Just last year in fact, Punjab University—Pakistan’s biggest university—and its vice chancellor, the man who runs that university, published a book with equally crazy, insane ideas. One would have thought, he is the head of a major university, the most major university, that he would be dismissed from his job. Nothing happened.

On the textbook issue, education has been made a provincial subject. So in the Sindh government and the Punjab government, you see efforts to modify the curriculum. There are attempts to remove hate speech against minorities, those from different castes, colours and creeds. There is also an effort to remove the anti-India rhetoric that has been part and parcel of all of our textbooks.  There are setbacks. [The former cricketer and politician] Mr Imran Khan’s PTI [Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf], runs a government in KPK [Khyber Pakhtunkhwa], which is the former Frontier Province [the North West Frontier Province was an administrative unit created by the British]. Unfortunately, the PTI is in coalition with the Jamaat-e-Islami party and it gave the education ministry in KPK to the Jamaat-e-Islami. As a result, the Jamaat-e-Islami has taken those textbooks, which were probably the most secular and most progressive among any part of Pakistan, and they have re-written them, to make them full of hate speeches, backward thinking and regressive ideas. That has been a setback, but it’s a process. At least there is a movement. These are the glimmers of hope on the horizon.

NS: You had suggested in an article that the killing of the activist Sabeen Mahmud in April last year is meant to be a warning to others to not publicly discuss state-enforced disappearances in Balochistan.

FI: Sabeen really believed in freedom of speech. Her death was as shocking as it was because she was not really a political figure as such. She was known in Karachi and among certain circles for doing a lot of good work and giving a platform, in a small way, to anyone who wanted to speak. And so when she was killed, the message was absolutely chilling, because this could happen even at that level of middle-class, civil society. It really silenced people who would normally not feel that they personally could have been targeted.

NS: You have noted in your book that justice in Pakistan is impeded by the biased attitude of some judges against religious minorities.

FI: The role of the judiciary has been mixed. There are some amazingly brave lawyers and judges in Pakistan. Among those, there are people who have been targeted and killed, such as Rashid Rahman, two years ago. There is fear when you’re dealing with terrorists specifically, who tend to be the perpetrators of most of these attacks. They will make phone calls at the very least. They make references to the judge’s or the lawyer’s family, their children, and they make direct threats. If the judges or the lawyers still go ahead, then they resort to physical violence. On the other hand, you also do have a cadre of judges who are themselves Islamo-nationalists.

NS: It was in response to this mixed judiciary that Nawaz Sharif had introduced military tribunals after the attack in Peshawar on 16 December 2014.

FI: I am personally am not in favour of military courts.  I am not in favour of the military being involved in any sphere of civilian life. I think it is a matter of balance, and we are working so hard to create democratic norms that it would have been far wiser to give judges protection. Yes, people were hugely in favour of this because they thought military courts would deliver speedy justice. But military courts can also mean that a lot of people you and I don’t think are terrorists can be picked up, tried and gone, and there can be no questions asked. That’s my personal view, but I understand that people are so tired of the blood bath of killing, that anything that looked like justice, especially speedy justice, was greeted with optimism.

NS: How do you think Sharif has performed in terms of empowering Pakistan’s religious minorities?

FI: Whether it is India or at home, Mr Sharif is trying. I would normally not be the person to greet much that he does with a great deal of optimism, because in the past during a previous prime-ministerial stint, he himself had tried to bring Sharia to Pakistan and made himself the Ameer, basically the Caliph. At this point, anyone who is doing something positive, I feel it has to be publicly affirmed and supported because it will take all of us with different points of view, different political backgrounds, and different ethnic and religious backgrounds, to be able to pull this off. It is a daunting task.

This interview has been edited and condensed.