Adil Najam
Report from News (21 February, 2007):
A fanatic shot dead Punjab Minister for Social Welfare Zill-e-Huma Usman “for not adopting the Muslim dress code” at a political meeting here at the PML House on Tuesday. A party worker caught the accused, Maulvi Sarwar, and handed him over to the Civil Lines Police. Huma was at the PML House to hold an open Kachehry. As she was busy meeting the PML women activists, the accused sitting in the audience approached her with a pistol and pumped bullets into her head from a point-blank range… The accused, M Sarwar Mughal - popularly known as Maulvi Sarwar - is a resident of Baghbnapura in Gujranwala. Two police stations of Gujranwala and the Tibbi police of Lahore had booked Maulvi Sarwar for the murder of six women, but he was acquitted for want of sufficient evidence. His alleged spree of killing “immoral” women started in the year 2002. In his confession statement before the police on Tuesday, he said he was opposed to women holding public office. He added that after he read in the newspaper that the minister was holding an open court, he decided to kill her.
Sometimes you just wonder why! Sometimes you just want to give up!
I have been feeling sad and numb and down and dejected all day. I heard about the brutal murder of Punjab Minister Zile Huma Usman’s murder by a crazed fanatic some 10 hours ago. And I have been in utter shock.
I have tossed and turned. I had thought earlier that I would not even write about it. What is the use? When a society goes so mad that a woman is killed just because she is a woman, what can a blog post do. Just ignite more silly debates; more childish heckling; more immature point-scoring; trying to show how smart you are; or, more likely, trying to show how idiotic others are; reaffirming your own belief that you are always right, and everyone else is always wrong; single-track chest thumping; self-righteous finger-pointing. No remorse. No compassion; not a word of sympathy; not a shred of caring. All there is, is anger; getting high on our own anger; anger for its own sake; getting so very angry that you even forget what or who you are angry at.
But now I do want to write about this. We, as a society, have some serious thinking to do.
What killed Zille Huma Usman? Not religion. Not madness. But anger. Uncontrolled anger.
A society that seems to be fueled by anger. No conversation is seen to be legitimate unless it is an angry conversation. And the solution to everything seems to be violence. ‘Kill the infidels’ say the believers. ‘Kill the mullahs’ shout the modernists. ‘Hang them by the gallows.’ ‘Put them in boats and let them sink.’ ‘Death is what they deserve.’ We have heard it all right here. I suspect we will hear it again. That dastardly, self-righteous anger. This violence in the language, as Zille Huma so tragically found, becomes the violence of bloodshed all too easily. Today it was in the name of religion. Tomorrow it will be something else.
So, do me a favor folks. Give her some dignity. Hold your anger. Think about what happened. Ponder. And pause. For the sake of whatever is sacred to you; please pause!
An innocent woman’s life has already been taken by our inability to put a lid on our passions and our anger. Let us please not make a tamasha out of her death by making her a poster child for whatever ’cause’ we are parading for right now.
This report in DAWN today:
Yes Kumar, and here we have some similarities, like late Indian PM Indra Gandhi was killed by her bodyguards on religious grounds.
My sincere condolences to the family of the late Ms. Zille Huma Usman. People who try to make a difference, some by being trailblazers but most by simply being a better role model for doing things in a way not usually done before - sometimes such people end up paying a price, in this case the ultimate price. I hope that future women leaders of Pakistan will not be dissuaded as a result of this dastardly deed.
tragic!
blame the man and not religion here MU sahib!please dont!
These are interpretational wrong doings!he is wrong simple no one can defend it!may be he was psychotic!
we can have a debate long ones people favoring people agianst the act people talking about society.I can summaries this in a idiom that will go both for the accuser and the victim “kawa chala hanss ki chaal apni b bhool gaya”
we are building motorways,nukes,missles,port towers,port fountain(fer poor people so they can see switzerland in karachi) but nuffin has been done for EDUCATION(We still have a bi-partisan education urdu-english) so that no one can pollute any one on the name of religion,modernity,equality,feminity,moderation and bla blah!!! a sign of a dead nation that can just put blames on others and dun wana look into their own!havent seen one person in pakistan who has admitted his fault!
threads will go on an on people will keep chanting and men and women on the name of religion will be killed!
the answer is education + justice the day it will happen or we will make it happen no one will kill!
I was just reading the WOmens day post and thought of this woman and how in her death and in the discussion after her death she was abused by those who think they are teh rakhwallahs of everyone’s morality
[…] Today is March 8 - International Women’s Day. Today we wish to celebrate women in the fullness of what it means to be a woman in Pakistan. To celebrate their achievements (also here, here, here and here). And to celebrate their struggles (also here, here, here and here). […]
Completely agree with you moeen
This is my column from this week in The News on Sunday
RIPPLE EFFECT
Fanatics, basant and tourism
By Omar R. Quraishi
If ever there is going to be a contest for a country with the highest number of fanatics per capita, I have a strong feeling that Pakistan will win it hands down. The last few weeks have been particularly bad (or good if one is looking from the point of view of winning this ‘contest’). The country was rocked by several suicide bombings and there was news that many more had been planned by the extremists/fanatics.
Thankfully, and for a change, our police and law-enforcement agencies had reportedly managed to nab several would-be suicide bombers but there were still many who were (and still are) said to be on the loose. All this obviously does not make for a carefree existence but then again who said that living in a country like Pakistan was going to be easy. There is bad (nay terrible) traffic, people with little or no civic sense, and now we have to deal with suicide bombers in our midst.
This is not all. As the days progressed, two other stories came and they drove home the point further (as if that could be done given how intolerant we have become as a society) that Pakistan has far more fanatics than we would like to admit. The first was the tragic murder of a doctor in FATA who had been sent to the region to manage the polio vaccination drive. He was killed by unidentified gunmen and it’s quite probable that this was done because the local population had been manipulated by some local mullahs into believing that vaccinating one’s child was the handiwork of the devil and hence should be avoided at all costs. A week or so later, this poisonous disinformation had reached Swat with a local cleric — and the son-in-law of the chief of the Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi Maulana Sufi Mohammad — reportedly telling the local population to not vaccinate their children when health workers come to their homes as part of the provincial government’s polio eradication drive.
The cleric, who apparently broadcasts his pernicious views without impunity on a makeshift FM station, also is reported to have said the following gems: “I must tell my brothers and sisters that finding a cure (vaccination) for an epidemic before its outbreak is not allowed in Sharia. According to Sharia, one should avoid going to the areas where an epidemic has broken out, but those who do go to such areas and get killed during an outbreak are martyrs.”
One does not know whether to laugh or cry at the presence of such people in our midst. It would be okay — of course relatively speaking — if they confined the import of their absurd and obscurantist views to themselves but the problem is that these purveyors of bigotry, disinformation and hate want everybody else to conform to their warped and skewed interpretation of religion.
And of course, there is this man from Gujranwala, a certain Maulvi Sarwar who killed the Punjab social welfare minister because he apparently disapproved of the way she dressed. The man is said to have, apparently by his own admission, killed several other women as well (one newspaper’s Gujranwala correspondent described them as ‘model girls’ while another called them ‘women of easy virtue’ — so much for the reporting standards of our print media since it seems women are judged even after they have died). Incidentally, Maulvi Sarwar was wanted in several cases and had even been arrested but was released for ‘want of evidence’ — will someone in Punjab’s law-enforcement and legal hierarchy explain why this was allowed to happen?
**********************
Tourism minister Neelofar Bakhtiyar can forget about making Visit Pakistan Year (2007) a success. Luckily modern-day Gujranwala probably does not have much to offer the foreign tourist, unless one’s wish is to visit a polluted industrial city with little tolerance for women in general and the arts and theatre in particular. As for the anti-polio mullah, he is a resident of Swat, otherwise known as Pakistan’s ‘Switzerland’ with its alpine landscape and verdant valleys (of course the fact many of its residents are lorded over by cleric who would have them live in the Dark Ages is something that one does not need to include in the travel brochure).
One can be absolutely sure that there are many Maulvi Sarwars out there, and they can be found especially in the areas that we want the goras to visit. I remember that as long as eight years ago on one of my regular trips to Nathiagali I came across small signboards nailed on trees by a local jihadi outfit saying that women who did not cover their hair deserved to have their hair chopped off at the very least. These were also bolted on the trees along the Ayubia chairlift, so one could read them as one went up the chairlift to the top. If they are still there — which they surely must be — they can now be translated into various foreign languages so that the hundreds of thousands of tourists who are sure to visit Pakistan this year can benefit from reading them.
**********************
Despite many hindrances, Basant thankfully happened this year. The whole debate, one must admit, has religious and cultural overtones and there is no need of getting into that. Just two things though. One: thousands of people die in traffic accidents every year, so do we ban people from buying and driving cars or do we ask them to be more careful. Two: strictly speaking constitutionally, isn’t it parliament’s prerogative to legislate (since it is sovereign and has the power to enact laws) and the judiciary’s to interpret such legislation?
The writer is Op-ed Pages Editor of The News.
Email: omarq@cyber.net.pk
What this Maulvi Sarwar did is an insult to all of us and a sign of how bad things are. He may be mad, but his views are also held by people who are more sane. The points that these religious fanatics are now raising on curriculum, on womens rights, on minorities and everything else, they just want another Taliban rule in Pakistan. We must not sit silently on this. Let us make sure that the death of this woman is not forgotten and not wasted.