It’s that time of year again when we inundate social media with ‘New year, New me’ statuses and shiny resolutions, trying to project the false hope that the next twelve months will be better than the last, still a little optimistic in the face of the tears and anguish that had resonated in our cities and bled from our pavements. 2015 in review is the first search option featured on Tumblr, but all that brings is a pile load of cat memes, runway projects and Anonymous declaring cyber war everywhere. And like the perfectly craved people we are, we gather in masses to follow the tidal waves of these trends, typing in our highly accurate conspiracy theories and watermarks, forgetting the year as we saw through the eyes of those who cried outside hospitals and ambulances as we let our indifference blow up their mosques and burn down their churches. So how about a year in review through the minority lens?
Still recovering from the horror of the APS attack, we are plunged into 2015, limping but alive, forcing ourselves to just stop peaking over our shoulders as we move in crowded bazaars and traffic-clogged highways. The reality is still sinking in, taking its time to slide down our throat. Each day brings a new toll, a new story to flash on our flat screens and portable radios, and as we sit twiddling our thumbs trying to force the awkward laughter past shaky lips, the first strike hits.
9 January. An explosion in an Imambargah in Rawalpindi. The news channels play a ticker tape featuring the causalities and the stats, each caster sounding louder than the one before. Images of flashing lights and marching soldiers run behind our lids and burn in our corneas. We shake our heads at the senseless killing, offer a few words of grief, and then we move on to football matching they’re airing on TenSports. Some zealous religious groups boast of taking hearty responsibility for that a few hours later, and we shake our heads again. What is this country coming to, we ask our peers on social media as we bring the onslaught of condolences and hashtags by the second. This rages on for a couple of hours, and then we move on- we move on like as if those statistics are just numbers on a screen and not living, breathing people who are neither longer living nor breathing anymore.
More bombs detonate, in Peshawar and Shikarpur. The rain washes away the blood from asphalt and sidewalks, but the scars remain as the bodies start to pile, and families are left with gaping holes in their structures. Shi’a genocide, we call it. Each congregational prayer is feared to be their last, and it feels like we’re falling back into the violent cycle of the past years all over again that we so desperately tried to escape from. But we get over it like we always do because that’s the one thing we’re best at.
Spring brings with it not the joy of nature in bloom but the heartache of Christian bloodshed. Twin Church bombings in Youhanabad, Lahore, claim more innocent lives and evoke the frenzy of angry mobs who extract retribution in any way they can. The minorities scream at the government for justice, but the officials respond with more promises they don’t plan to keep. Mothers sit outside morgues and clutch their broken hearts, tears streaming down their pallid cheeks that leave track marks on their skin and quiver by their chins. The lanterns that had burned brightly in their homes are gone, never to return. And there’s no consolation for their loss. Eventually, the ambulances go silent and the night grows to a hush.
But the nature of these events elicits a sense of detachment from us. It was the religious extremists, we say, as we defend our innocence. We don’t blow up bombs. It’s them, not us.
That would be a good justification, if not for the rise in hate crimes against the minorities. With the Capital Punishment back in action, we the majority use it as our armor and swords against those who don’t share our beliefs. Blasphemy, we hear on our television screens as some bearded guy with angry eyes and flaring nostrils spits, declaring war. They deserve to die. More words follow, like wajib-ul-qatal and kaafir. The intellectual circles frown, some try to fix the issue, but, in the end, everyone is silenced by the use of brute force. So we sit silently in our homes and brim with anger and sadness at how these mindless mobs use religion to torch down Ahmadiyya factories and places of worship. We break a little when we hear how buses carrying Ismailis are run into road blocks and placed under open fire. We chew our lips raw when news of another Sikh gunned down outside his shop reaches our ears. And sometimes, when nobody’s watching, we turn on the other side of the beds and let the tears fall as we remember the tiny corpses that’ll choke six feet under the ground and gravestones that’ll chip away and fade with time.
So what do we gain by marginalizing these people to the outskirts of our society? Do they not bleed like the rest of us, scar like the rest of us? Does the color of their eye sing another tune or do their hearts somehow beat faster than ours? They fight on the front lines, just like the rest of our men, their allegiances and hearts lie with the prosperity of this nation, and yet we deny to let them call this land their home by not letting them live their lives and religion in peace. Each calamity we face feeds us through the same shredder, then sticks us back together with a great hefty staple gun and a few rusty pins, with some glue and spit to make sure we don’t pull apart at the seams. And yet we stand divided, daring the other to cross the line.
But somehow, I can’t say we’re all that bad. We celebrate Diwali with the same zest and brim our restaurants with Christmas trees and bobbling little Santa Claus figurines and celebrate Easter just the same. When the pilgrims come to visit their temples, we welcome them with open arms and hope their journeys fare them well. We provide Shi’as with maximum security outsides their Imambargahs to make sure they don’t have to pay with their lives anymore. There is integrity all around us as there is calamity, and there is also hope, the hope that we see when our children play in playgrounds without discrimination and our students learn with their hearts open to love and share. And with that hope, we look into the future and welcome another year into our lives and trust it will do us all well.
