Paul Keenan
The blasphemy law proves politically useful, writes Paul Keenan
If politics is the art of ‘spin’, a masterclass of the art was offered to the world this week from Pakistan.
Amid an angry row surrounding five abducted secular human rights activists, the nation’s Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan intervened on the issue of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to deny that said legislation is misused to target the Christian community.
“The facts and figures reveal that in most blasphemy cases the accused were Muslims,” Khan was quoted as stating at the end of January. Referring to a sample 129 cases brought under Clause 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, the minister revealed that 99 of the total were cases registered against other Muslims.
“These facts point toward the fact that religious minorities are not being embroiled in blasphemy cases more than Muslims,” Khan contended. He went on to conclude: “In essence, religious minorities are not being targeted by the blasphemy laws.”
If this deft sleight-of-statistics was intended to convince those with even a passing familiarity with how Clause 295-C is routinely enacted against Christians by those with agendas against them, it very quickly failed.
Persecution
Quite aside from the immediate countering of Minister Khan’s words by Wilson Chowdry of the British Pakistani Christian Association – “Sadly, Mr Khan’s comments, even when taken at face value, suggest that minority persecution is way above the expected values for such a small percentile of Pakistan’s population [at 1.6% of the population]” – any reading of the wealth of cases in which Christians have fallen foul of the unsubstantiated accusations of others gives cause enough to perceive chronic abuse of the law.
It is sufficient to look only at the case of Asia Bibi, still lingering on death row, to realise that the mere word of an accuser is enough to bring an unfortunate individual to such a fate in Pakistan. Despite zero substantiating evidence, Bibi’s pursuit of justice can gain no fair hearing in the appeals court, and even if she could achieve that, the price placed on her head by a fundamentalist cleric means that her death warrant is signed, regardless of the outcome of any re-hearing of her case.
With a record of lynchings, immolations and the torching of entire Christian neighbourhoods by mobs driven by nothing more than allegations of blasphemy, Pakistan’s legislators have sufficient reason to accept that there are those willing to use all means to target the Christian community, including allegations under law through which despised neighbours can be driven out by police action or Muslim rage. (Minister Khan’s statistics are falsely reduced by non-inclusion of blasphemy cases that never make the police/court stage by instant ‘justice’ at the hands of the mob.)
The circumstances surrounding the blasphemy accusation against teenager Rimsha Masih in 2012 should have offered evidence enough for the authorities in Pakistan to recognise the hair-trigger upon which the entire penal code around blasphemy rests.
Made a hate figure for Muslims when accused of burning pages of the Koran, Rimsha Masih’s case caused something of a sensation when it transpired that a number of witnesses could testify that her accuser, a cleric, had in fact been the one to damage the holy pages by which he sought to damn the girl. The case against him was quietly dropped while Masih was forced to flee abroad.
Yet, even then, legislators, while held in check by terror of a massive backlash against dropping the Penal Code, did not even consider tightening up the law to prevent cases proceeding on mere word-of-mouth. (In this they would have the support of at least one cohort of clerics who, at the beginning of this month, participated in a televised discussion on the blasphemy law and were unanimous in the judgement that false allegations are sinful under Islamic law and all allegations should be substantiated.)
The roots of political fear lie in part in the fate of the late Salman Taseer, whose vocal demands in 2011 for reform of the blasphemy law led his bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, to turn his gun fatally on the politician, to outpourings of joy from thousands who agreed with the act and consider the executed Qadri as a martyr in Heaven.
Now Pakistan is set to be tested again in its application of law due to events in January around the aforementioned activist bloggers.
Well known for their human rights activities, there was uproar last month when Prof. Salman Haider, Waqas Goraya, Aasim Saeed, Ahmed Raza Naseer and Samar Abbas were individually snatched from the streets between January 4 and 7, reportedly by men in civilian clothes in pick-up trucks, leading to the belief that the abductors were, in fact, members of the military, so often the target of criticism by the activists.
The kidnapped men’s websites were later shut down, leading to further speculation as to involvement by the security services.
Serious though the collective kidnappings were, more serious was the subsequent wave of allegations on Facebook that the activists are linked to the Facebook pages Bhensa, Roshni and Mochi, known for their posts critical of the military and religious extremists.
Belief
But herein lies the rub. The three Facebook pages have been accused of containing content blasphemous to Islam, thereby damning anyone who can be identified as controlling said pages. Despite any lack of hard evidence, the seeds of belief have been slowly sown to implicate the activists. The allegations have seeped into the television broadcasts of popular Islamic figures, one of whom has been taken off-air such has been the scale of his vitriol against the activists.
Thus, when one of the disappeared, Prof. Salman Haider, turned up in Islamabad on January 27 and returned safely to his family, it was not long before an official investigation was announced on the grounds of blasphemy. The Federal Investigation Agency confirmed as much at the start of February and said legal opinion on the accusation is now being sought.
This conscientious pursuit of legal opinion will be cold comfort to the activists who must now exist with the ‘guilty even if proved innocent’ label that accompanies a blasphemy allegation.
Worse still, the doing down of the political opposition posed by the activists through blasphemy allegations is something political figures, already doubtful of the law’s misuse, are unlikely to challenge.
In this they should exercise caution against an expediency that could all too easily rebound when the extremists look for new enemies.