NEW DELHI, Jan 4:
Pakistani author Haroon Khalid says that incidents of intolerance have been happening in his country for a few years now and hopes that India’s bubble of “tolerant” silent majority is never busted.
One of the biggest such incidents in Pakistan, according to Khalid, was the assassination of Punjab’s governor Salman Taseer by his fanatic security guard.
“Salman Taseer came out in the defence of a Christian woman called Asia Bibi, who had been accused of blasphemy and awarded capital punishment. What was the scariest thing though that Taseer’s assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, was projected as a hero, a defender of Islam, while Taseer was vilified further after his death,” Khalid, who recently penned the book “A White Trail: A Journey Into The Heart Of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities,” told PTI.
“For a lot of analysts the death of Taseer represents the time when the myth about the silent tolerant majority was busted,” he adds.
India, so it seems, fortunately has so far been safe from such a horrible incident, he says.
“However I do see a lot of parallels between the condition in India and Pakistan of a few years ago. First is the ‘myth’ that the majority of ‘us’ are tolerant while it is only a vocal minority that is intolerant. This is a dangerous assumption.
“Acts of hatred and intolerance tend to happen in contexts and environments where there is a tolerance for such intolerance. Like Pakistan, one would hope that India’s bubble of ‘tolerant’ silent majority is never busted,” he says.
Another parallel, he says that he is noticing “is this idea of hush, to not talk about growing intolerance, fearing that this would somehow project a negative image of the country”.
“Many people in Pakistan were raising this voice in Pakistan when things looked bad here… One hears similar voices in India and that is not the voice of sanity,” he says.
He also rues that religious fundamentalism and intolerance have seeped into the Pakistani society and have become an everyday reality.
Khalid, also a freelance journalist, describes his book, published by Westland, primarily as a travelogue.
“The book reflects my awe and surprise at the different religious rituals, traditions and communities that have not only survived in Pakistan but over the past few years have begun exerting themselves more than before,” he says.
The book delves deep into the different religious communities, including Hindu, Sikh, Baha’i, Parsi and Christian and discovers that the situation that each one of these community faces is different from the other.
It also aims to highlight the differences within these communities that are a product of the different socio-economic class and also geographical locations.
Khalid got the idea of the book soon after graduation when he embarked on a series of travels with the purpose of exploring the Hindu and Sikh heritage of Pakistan.
With the religious communities one of the biggest challenges he faced was to win their confidence.
“Given the atmosphere of fear I found that a lot of members of these communities have constructed their own protective walls, which meant that a lot of conversations and discussions were guarded. After some engagement though cracks began to appear in these structures and I began hearing stories of persecution, of vulnerability and fear,” he says.
Asked about the significance of the book’s title “A White Trail”, Khalid replies, “The book is a travelogue through the religious festivals of minorities in Pakistan, and using these festivals it talks about the socio-economic and political condition of these minorities, which is why I have used the word trail.
“There is a popular story in Pakistan that states that the white part in our flag is representative of the religious minorities in the country, which is why I have used the word White. It is a journey through the white part of the country.”
The research for the book took about two years.
“This included hundreds of interviews that I conducted and dozens of religious festivals and pilgrimages that I attended. However given that I was already writing and researching about Hindu and Sikh heritage in Pakistan it was much easier for me to conduct my research,” he says. (PTI)
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