Choudhry Rahmat Ali first coined ‘Pakstan’ (original spelling) in his note ‘Now or Never’, where he envisaged the word to signify “It means the land of the Paks, the spiritually pure and clean”.
The only country in the world to have been created in the name of religion is, 75 years after its independence, failing desperately to live up to Choudhry Rahmat Ali’s conceptualisation, as perceived by the rest of the world.
The modern-day Islamic Republic of Pakistan or Islami Jamhuriyah Pakistan is a far cry from the one posited by its Qaide-Azam (Father of the Nation), Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
As a reflection of its drift from the initial anchorage, the transcript of Jinnah’s seminal address to the New Constituent Assembly at Karachi where he famously said, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan … You may belong to any religion or caste or creed ~ that has nothing to do with the business of the State…”, is deliberately lost from public record or insisted recollection.
Today, if the sovereign passport is taken to be the definitive indicator of a citizen’s identity and therefore a reflection of the sovereign’s standing and acceptability, the befittingly green coloured Pakistani passport is ranked dismally.
As per the latest Henley Passport Index, Pakistan is the fourth-worst ranked passport in the world ~ an ignominy made worse by an even lower rating than that of failed States like Somalia, Yemen or even North Korea.
Only dysfunctional states like Syria, Iraq and Islamabad’s aspired ‘Strategic Depth’ state of Afghanistan, are ranked lower. It didn’t happen at the instance of imagined ‘enemies’ across the Line-of-Control (LOC) or the proverbial ‘West’, but by its own undoing, and the passport is only a testimony of its self-goals.
The Pakistani application proforma “in case of all Muslims” requires one to sign or thumbimpress the following line, “I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Quadiani to be an imposter nabi and also consider his followers whether belonging to the Lahori or Qadiani group to be non-Muslim”.
Such regression didn’t happen suddenly, it was in the making for the longest time. It wasn’t even the dictators in ‘Uniform’, or the clerical parties, or the likes of ‘Taliban Khan’ (read Imran Khan) ~ but the socalled poster boy of moderation, ‘progressive politics’ and supposedly educated, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who introduced the Second Amendment in 1974 that etched a category of non-Muslims as, “persons of the Qadiani group or the Lahori group [meaning the majority and minority branch of the Ahmadiyya] (who call themselves ‘Ahmadis’ or by any other name).”
Bhutto’s one-time protégé and the man who later sent him to the gallows, General Zia-ulHaq, only officialized the agenda of bigotry and discrimination of its own citizens further.
Since then, many so-called democrats who have taken up leadership roles in Pakistan dare not undo the officialized hatred and toxic religiousity that is the bane of Pakistani perceptions, globally.
Pakistan has been credibly castigated as the international ‘nursery of terrorism’ ~ the impact on the passport is only consequential.
Tellingly, even though the British-Indian ethnicity far outstrips those from the British-Pakistani diaspora by a clear margin, the racist slur affixed on to all people from the Indian sub-continent (entailing even the sizeable population of those from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal) in the United Kingdom is ‘Paki’! Somewhere in the 1960s and 70s when revisionist and extremist winds started blowing ‘back home’, the sensibilities of society, culture and therefore popular perception, changed for the worse.
As the Pakistani society and narrative has steadily gone down the slippery slope of unreason, intransigence and unacceptance of modern times, it continues to suffer perceptions of repressive tendencies. It took British Home Secretary Suella Braverman to specifically call out British-Pakistani gangs for sexual grooming ~ she had insisted that the Pakistani ethnic-specific call-out was the overwhelming truth and therefore not racist.
In an article defending her allegation she noted, “If we are to address the injustice of the grooming gangs’ scandal, we must be willing to acknowledge the role that ethnicity played in covering it up.”
With such a backdrop and the news of mushrooming extremism and violence emanating from Pakistan, it is hardly surprising that it suffers diminishment in international imagination and dignity.
Even the recent horrific boat tragedy off the coast of Greece, which is believed to have drowned hundreds of trafficked refugees is rife with murmurs of ill-treatment of Pakistanis.
There are damning accounts of how Pakistanis were condemned to, “the most dangerous part of the trawler”, where they had little or practically no chance of survival.
Guardian reports that while some nationalities were allowed on the top deck of the boat which was inherently more comfortable and safer, the Pakistanis were forced below the deck. They were apparently snubbed when they asked for equitable conditions.
So, while there is understandable anger and angst at the purported laxity (even deliberate dereliction) by the Greek authorities that perhaps resulted in the terrible tragedy ~ it is the secondclass treatment and discrimination of the Pakistanis, even by the human traffickers and the boat staff (when contextualised with other nationalities on board like the Egyptians, Syrians etc.), that is stark.
Seemingly, living in denial is a Pakistani specialty, considering the defiant and unlearnt front that it continues to put up in the face of unprecedented socio-economic desperation, societal implosion and a civil-war-like situation when conflated with the reality in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Baluchistan etc.
Even Pakistan’s ostensible ‘backyard’ and progeny in the form of Afghan Taliban is up in arms against it, while the sectarian dissonance with a Shi’ite Iran is a permanent problem.
The Arab Sheikhdoms are also no longer as generous or accommodative as they used to be and while they are making their own peace and diplomatic relations with Israel, the ‘land of pure’ remains the oddity that hasn’t moved along with the times ~ worse, it is harking back to heresy and heterodoxy as the pressure increases.
A cursory look at the fate of the once ridiculed ‘East Pakistan’, or now the relatively thriving Bangladesh, versus Choudhry Rahmat Ali’s dream of the ‘land of the Pure’ and its people, is a story by itself.