Here's how I express my fears about the current crisis of intolerance in Pakistan by paraphrasing what Niemöller said in 1930s:
First they came for Ahmedis, and I did not speak out
-- Because I was not an Ahmedi.
Then they came for the Christians, and I did not speak out
-- Because I was not a Christian.
Then they came for the Hindus, and I did not speak out
-- Because I was not a Hindu.
Then they came for the Shias, and I did not speak out
-- Because I was not a Shia.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.
I urge all sane Pakistanis to speak out against all agents of intolerance and work diligently to defeat them before it's too late.
Here are two videos of recent TV discussions I participated in on the subject:
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Fighting Agents of Intolerance in Pakistan
Muslim Scholars Must Fight Hate in Pakistan
South Asian Christians Celebrate Christmas in Fear
Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Vision
Pakistan Must Defeat Agents of Intolerance
Celebrating Quaid-e-Azam M.A. Jinnah's Birthday
28 comments:
You have the order wrong and the severity I think. They came first for the Shias and attack Shias far more than any other group.
It is the Wahhabi influence and Govt is too dependent on Saudis (oil) and Qataris (gas) to do anything meaningful it seem to me. [And western coddling of these two evil sources doesn't help.] And they have now come against "us" as they are now attacking the Barelvis. people need to speak up about root of the problem not beat around the bush.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17936651
Mayraj: "They came first for the Shias and attack Shias far more than any other group."
I mentioned Ahmadis as the first target of hate because of the laws passed to exclude them from the fold of Islam, followed by "wajib-ul-qatl" fatwas. Even the Shia ulema participated in promoting violence against Ahmedi minority when TV host Aamer Liaquat's inflammatory rhetoric led to the killing of several Ahmadis a few years ago.
And now Sunni vs Sunni
The first bloody attack on a Sufi mazar, or shrine, was a suicidal assault on Imam Bari.With Kabul in Deoband hands, JUI gained a new political leverage in Pakistan. That JUI has been part of every government since 1990 reflects influence it enjoys in the echelons of power
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/1105/In-Pakistan-militant-attacks-on-Sufi-shrines-on-the-rise
Very good discussion, thanks for sharing
Ahmedis are to Islam what Mormons are to Christianity and since they say they are within fold while traditions groups say otherwise there is the problem. But anyway, attacks against them are not in same league as attacks against Shias and now increasingly the Barelvis.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables-saudi-terrorist-funding
WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists
http://tribune.com.pk/story/173744/wikileaks-saudi-arabia-uae-funded-extremist-networks-in-pakistan/
Wikileaks: Saudi Arabia, UAE funded extremist networks in Pakistan
Ahmedis are under attack in other Muslim countries as well. Other Muslim countries are not seeking attacks like Pakistanis is seeing against Shia's and Barelvis. It is really sad to see what is happening in Malaysia and Indonesia as they had a more seculr strain of islam also reflected in Kerala (linked to the SEA because of trade ties). What this demonstrates is the Wahhabi influences' spread. They have been using oil and now gas income to spread their beliefs amongst Sunnis around the world. As Congressional testimony reveals Saudis have spent over 70 billion dollars since the 1970s (coincidentally after the oil Embargo and petrodollar deal)
The roots of intolerance in Pakistan lead to Jamiat/ Jamaatis. Before their time, the Pakistani society was very tolerant to opposing groups be they religious or on moral grounds. Eg, rioting to close down liquor shops, thunder squads in universities and such moves were all started by Jamaatis; these had nothing to do with religious sects.
I know a lot of Jamaatis of our university days who have left Jamaat. But then they had become immaterial and of no use to Jamaat even if they had remained there. In the late 60s and early 70s, Jamaat had not gained roots in the country and was a very vulnerable entity. The numerous Jamaatis of that time, particularly of Jamiat at the educational institutions, were a key factor in sustaining Jamaat through that period. Most of these ex-Jamaatis I know did not have intolerant views even then, but were naive enough not to realize what Jamaat stood for. So I think ex-Jamaatis should realize that they have had a role and share some responsibility for what is happening in the country, for their naivete if not for their extremist views.
Jamaat used to be mohajir dominated at that time but then was taken over by Punjabis, and now Pathans are as important in it as the Punjabis.
We need to go back to what our founding Father Jinnah said.
Keep it up!
Your family name is "HAQ" so you will talk about justice all the time. I know when we use to slaughter a sheep at EID and butcher want other animals to move away from the site so that they want seen it. Our Prophet( SAS ) has always preached us about peace and humanity that why he is called "Rahmat_ ull_ Allumeen". Even during Haj we are trained not to kill an insect . Now the so called Muslims they are beheading humans in front other humans not in Pakistan but Syria and other parts of the Muslim world. The people who are killed don't get a chance to get buried as their funerals also bombed.
One to must search his sole and see who is preaching them and which countries are funding them. Please take a moment and review the history and see if such things have happened in the past and whose family has sacrificed his life to save Islam.
Can anyone answer why it is a coincidence that the rise of religion in Pakistan in public sphere also coincided with anti minorities hatred.
i agree with you 100% we have to fight together for any injustice , i will be forwarding your videos to my friends .
i have been a reader of your blog since last 2-3 years. and i have seen a changecreeping into your personality.
earlier, you used datas to show how pakistan is in trouble, but india is in even bigger mess. that did irk me back then, but yes, you were the first person to on internet to tell me about the reality of my country. and many thanks for that.
ABOUT the change i was talking about in you, it was that your recent posts are all about pakitan, and their comparison with indis is missing.
now, you seem to be more worried about your country.
however, i must say, that pakistan is an unfortunate country, where experienced and knowledgeable enterpreneurs like you have to waste time in this manner, while the young generation is getting killed in cold-blood.
what kind of intolerance is this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/world/asia/some-pakistani-women-risk-all-to-marry-for-love.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
Anon: "what kind of intolerance is this?"
It's very unfortunate.
It's the same kind of intolerance that has cause parents to kill many an Indian girls who have dared to defy tradition by marrying against the family's will.
It's the same kind of intolerance that makes Pakistani Hindu parents mad at times when their daughters elope with Muslim young men to marry them.
Here's an excerpt of Pankaj Mishra's review of Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson:
‘Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’ ‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ Daisy whispers with a wink at Nick. But there’s no stopping Buchanan. ‘And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’-------------
Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early 20th century, in which the Yellow Peril seemed real, the Ku Klux Klan had re-emerged, and Theodore Roosevelt worried loudly about ‘race-suicide’. In 1917, justifying his reluctance to involve the United States in the European war, Woodrow Wilson told his secretary of state that ‘white civilisation and its domination over the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’
Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First World War had encouraged political assertiveness among subjugated peoples from Egypt to China. Unlike other popular racists, who parsed the differences between Nordic and Latin peoples, Stoddard proposed a straightforward division of the world into white and coloured races. He also invested early in Islamophobia, arguing in The New World of Islam (1921) that Muslims posed a sinister threat to a hopelessly fractious and confused West. Like many respectable eugenicists of his time, Stoddard later found much to like about the Nazis, which marked him out for instant superannuation following the exposure of Nazi crimes in 1945.
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It is hard, even with Google, to keep up with Ferguson’s many claims and counter-claims. But his announcements of the dawning of the ‘Chinese Century’ and his more recent revised prophecy that India will outpace China, can be found as quickly as the boisterous heralding of the American imperium that he now disavows. As for his views on the innate superiority, indeed indispensability, of Western civilisation, these can be easily ascertained from his published writings and statements. Here is an extract from an interview early this year in the Guardian justifying the conquest of Native Americans:
The Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don’t know what they were because they didn’t write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don’t think we’d have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we’ve had in North America.
It says something about the political culture of our age that Ferguson has got away with this disgraced worldview for as long as he has. Certainly, it now needs to be scrutinised in places other than the letters page of the LRB.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man
Here's NY Times on derogatory film "Innocence of Muslims" mocking Prophet Muhammad:
For Google last week, the decision was clear. An anti-Islamic video that provoked violence worldwide was not hate speech under its rules because it did not specifically incite violence against Muslims, even if it mocked their faith.
The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.
Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.
These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.
Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.
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mpany said, “Facebook’s policy prohibits content that threatens or organizes violence, or praises violent organizations.”
Facebook also explicitly prohibits what it calls “hate speech,” which it defines as attacking a person. In addition, it allows users to report content they find objectionable, which Facebook employees then vet. Facebook’s algorithms also pick up certain words that are then sent to human inspectors to review; the company declined to provide details on what kinds of words set off that kind of review. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/technology/on-the-web-a-fine-line-on-free-speech-across-globe.html
Riaz there are plenty of derogatory movies against Christians 'Nuns on the run' and Hindus 'The Guru' why is it they never go ape the way muslims do?
Traffic Wardens are not good then can not control traffic .
Here's a Guardian Op Ed on blasphemy laws in Pakistan as "imitating and copying aspects of western thought":
In the Qur'an there is no equivalent of blasphemy. The idea of reviling the sacred is of course condemned but this is markedly different from the way blasphemy is perceived in post-Enlightenment countries. Believers are urged in the sixth chapter of the Qur'an to "not revile those whom they pray to other than Allah so that they do not revile Allah through their ignorance". In modern Arabic the word used in newspapers and television for blasphemy is tajdeef, from the root ja-da-fa, which among other things can mean to propel a boat using oars. Importantly, the word tajdeef seems to be a recent addition to the language and is not mentioned in the Qur'an.
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There are strict Qur'anic injunctions for those who are deemed to be apostates and heretics or those who revile, curse, taunt or abuse, but these terms all have different contexts and jurisprudential uses from that of blasphemy. Similarly, the Qur'an takes a very strong view against those who create fitna (strife) but then almost every country has tough laws for the prosecution of those who instigate others in order to create public unrest. The second chapter of the Qur'an says that fitna is worse than killing. Importantly, it seems that the most severe condemnation in the Qur'an is for the munafiqoon (hypocrites). Notably, a hypocrite is the diametric opposite of a blasphemer in that he or she hold conflicting views in public and private while the latter openly airs their views. Thus, the hypocrite is much more dangerous.
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The basic motivation behind these laws seems less to do with religion and more to do with a desire by certain countries to create a homogenous society in terms of religious belief. Thus it leaves very little scope for any form of dissent and facilitates the persecution of minorities. This, of course, is also bolstered by the already exclusionary nature of nationalism. There are a whole series of laws in America and in Europe as well as in "Islamic" countries to do with hate speech and preserving the peace that should be utilised instead and blasphemy laws should be done away with.
Muslims are not permitted to "blaspheme" for in doing so they are actually disobeying clear Qur'anic injunctions that prohibit the slander of other people's beliefs. Those who revile the icons and sacred spaces of others' religions therefore only disrespect the teachings of their own religion. Respect for the sacred spaces of other faiths was famously demonstrated by the second caliph Omar. When Jerusalem was taken he was invited by the patriarch to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He refused and prayed in the courtyard because he did not want to set precedent and endanger the church's status as a site of Christian worship. Today, it is ironic therefore that the very people who criticise the west and its policies often end up imitating and copying aspects of western thought that do not have their roots in Islamic thought.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/nov/01/pakistan-indonesia-blasphemy-laws-quran
Very well summed-up Haq! I'm glad someone in Pakistan is speaking out against religious intolerance!
My compliments!
90% of Indians are idiots, says Justice Katju according to India Times:
NEW DELHI: Ninety percent of Indians are “idiots” who can easily be misled by mischievous elements in the name of religion, Press Council of India (PCI) chairperson Justice Markandey Katju claimed today.
“I say ninety percent of Indians are idiots. You people don’t have brains in your heads….It is so easy to take you for a ride,” he said at a seminar here.
He said that a communal riot could be incited in Delhi for as meagre an amount as Rs 2000. He said that all somebody has to do is make a mischievous gesture of disrespect to a place of worship and people start fighting each other.
“You mad people will start fighting amongst yourself not realising that some agent provocateur is behind this,”he said.
Katju said that before 1857 there was no communalism in the country but the situation was different now. “Today 80 percent Hindus are communal and 80 percent Muslims are communal. This is the harsh truth, bitter truth that I am telling you. How is it that in 150 years you have gone backwards instead of moving forward because the English kept injecting poison,” Katju said.
“The policy that emanated from London after the mutiny in 1857 that there is only one way to control this country that is to make Hindus and Muslims fight each other,” he said.
He said that then there was a propaganda that Hindi was the language of Hindus and Urdu of Muslims. “Our ancestors also studied Urdu, but it is so easy to fool you. You are idiots so how difficult is it to make an idiot of you,” Katju said.
Katju said that he was saying these harsh things to make Indians, whom he loved to understand the whole game and not remain fools.
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-12-08/news/35689114_1_justice-markandey-katju-hindus-communal-riot
Here's an NPR report on Pakistan's "patriot Act":
Earlier this month, Pakistan's powerful Lower House of Parliament passed what analysts have dubbed Pakistan's Patriot Act. Its name here is "Investigation for Fair Trial Bill."
It has been presented to the Pakistani people as a way to update existing law and usher the rules for investigation in Pakistan into the 21st century. Among other things, it makes electronic eavesdropping admissible as evidence in court.
To American ears, the argument for the new law should sound vaguely familiar. Pakistani officials say that in order to fight the war against terror, they need to be allowed to capture emails, listen in on cellphone calls, and track suspects so they can stay one step ahead of the terrorists.
That's the same argument FBI Director Robert Mueller made before members of Congress when the FBI sought changes in the Patriot Act.
Already A Common Practice
The difference is that the Pakistani version has been introduced into an entirely different societal context. To begin with, it is an open secret that security agencies in Pakistan already tape phones and monitor email with impunity.
They are supposed to get warrants to do this, but they rarely do. The bill is seen as legal cover for what is already common practice. Another difference: This being Pakistan, the feeling among those who are following the bill is that the investigative powers won't be limited to terrorists. Politicians, they believe, are likely to be the main targets.
"There are two sides of the argument. One is that this is a country at war — a war within and war in the region — so you need certain laws to protect people from terrorist activity," says Harris Khaliq, a poet and columnist in Islamabad. "At the same time, Pakistan has a checkered political history and we as citizens are really wary of a situation where these laws or such policies could be actually used to oppress political opponents of whoever is in power."
It is common to use criminal charges as a brickbat against powerful politicians. Bribery and corruption charges are routinely filed and then dismissed. Smear campaigns are frequent. Democracy in Pakistan is too fragile to allow these kinds of sweeping powers, says Aasim Sajjad, a professor of political economy at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
"Frankly, to be honest, it is not as if this act per se would be required for this sort of big-brother apparatus to operate. I think it operates in any case," Sajjad says. "The worry is that the state and the intelligence apparatus here has historically been so powerful and so unaccountable that there is a feeling that we would be totally surrendering every last remaining bit of independence or civil liberties" by passing the law....
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/02/168222711/pakistans-patriot-act-could-target-politicians
Here's Global Post on witness protection in Pakistan:
Ten years ago, Mohammad Ajmal was arrested in Karachi for the murders of 38 men. The murders, all committed in the Pakistani province of Sindh, were neither his first nor his last offenses.
Ajmal, better known in Pakistan by his alias, Akram Lahori, had been systematically killing Shiite Muslims since 1996, when he founded Lashkar e Jhangvi, a militant organization with ties to Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.
Today, inside Karachi Central Jail, Lahori waits once again to hear the date of his impending trial, one that has been heard, postponed and rescheduled multiple times.
Pakistan’s courts value testimonies from eyewitnesses above all else. And, in this case, two of the three witnesses have disappeared. The third turned hostile.
Disappearing witnesses have become so common that during its last parliamentary session, the Sindh government moved to consider a witness protection bill that would provide eyewitnesses with sanctuary and relocation so they could testify safely. For Lahori’s victims, however, the bill might come too late.
When he was first arrested in 2002, the six-foot tall Lahori proudly told investigators that he was also responsible for killing another 30 Shiites in Punjab.
The confession, though, meant little to Pakistan’s courts.
Since then, Karachi’s high court has acquitted Lahori in several cases of sectarian killings, citing a lack of evidence and witnesses. Though he awaits verdicts from Karachi’s anti-terrorism courts, people familiar with Lahori’s case say chances are that the confessed criminal will be set free.
Family members of Lahori’s victims say they have little hope of seeing any sort of justice executed by Pakistan’s legal system. They cite the now infamous acquittal of Malik Ishaq, another founding member of Lashkar e Jhangvi, last July. Authorities accuse Ishaq, long heralded as Pakistan’s most dangerous terrorist, of masterminding the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in 2009.
While he was detained, Ishaq told reporters and jail wardens that he was personally responsible for the murders of 102 men. However, the Supreme Court of Pakistan released Ishaq after holding him for 14 years, pointing to an acute lack of eyewitnesses in the case.
“I couldn’t believe that they set him free,” said the wife of one of Ishaq’s victims. “There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that he committed those crimes, murdering people just for not being in the same religion. Now he’s free to wander Lahore’s streets anyway.”
Activists and top-level politicians in Pakistan say that the cases of Lahori and Ishaq aren’t unusual. In Karachi’s anti-terrorism courts, where the conviction rate hovers around 26 percent, the number one reason for acquittals is the lack of witnesses.
The new witness protection bill might help — a little. Presiding over a meeting in Karachi in November, President Asif Ali Zardari acknowledged that a lack of witness testimony was hindering effective prosecution, and specifically directed the Sindh government to work on legislation that guarantees witnesses’ safety.
The Sindh government has already set aside $10,000 for the program, which has been modeled on current laws in other countries, and aims to protect witnesses and their families so that they can record their testimonies in court....
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/pakistan/121226/pakistan-witness-protection-justice-law-courts-human-rights
Here's an excerpt from Time magazine about the impunity of Shia murderer Malik Ishaq of LeJ:
The failure to stop these militants is the collective failure of Pakistan’s power elites: the politicians, the army and the judiciary. Less than 24 hours after the Quetta attacks, Malik Ishaq, a notorious LeJ leader, was in Karachi inciting further anti-Shi‘ite hatred. “I don’t have fun making speeches,” the self-confessed killer of Shi’ites told his supporters. “You know what I have fun doing.”
Ishaq was shockingly released from prison in 2011 after the courts said they didn’t have enough evidence to convict him. As is often the case, witnesses are not protected and are either eliminated or reduced to a terrified silence. The prosecution and the police fail to marshal the evidence necessary to support a conviction. There are also questions that analysts raise about Islamabad’s intelligence agencies’ links to sectarian groups like the LeJ and its parent organization, the SSP.
Ishaq has barely been prevented from roaming around freely. He was briefly taken into custody once only to be released again. He and his cohorts are also the beneficiaries of sordid deals with Pakistan’s power elites. When the army’s headquarters were under siege in 2009, Ishaq was reportedly flown from prison to help negotiate a stand-down. The Punjab government, lead by the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N, has courted votes alongside leaders of the anti-Shi‘ite SSP.
The failure of Pakistani authorities to protect the Shi‘ite population and act against their killers is eroding faith in the state and its institutions. Their failures amount, as Human Rights Watch has said, to complicity. It also raises troubling questions about Pakistan’s identity. In 1947, after the partition of the subcontinent, Pakistan was founded ostensibly as a state for the region’s Muslims — and the minorities that live there. The founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was himself a secular man of a Shi‘ite background.
http://world.time.com/2013/01/15/pakistans-newest-martyrs-why-anti-shiite-violence-may-be-the-countrys-biggest-problem/
Here's Pankaj Mishra in Bloomberg on atrocities against shias in Indonesia and Pakistan:
the obsession with the deep state’s incurable malignity or Islam’s menacing sociopolitical manifestations, which actually range from Wahhabi blowhards to relatively sagacious televangelists, obscures how elected politicians, in the absence of substantive democracy, cynically deploy radical groups to practice power politics.
The government in Pakistan’s Punjab province, which is run by the Pakistan Muslim League (N), one of Pakistan’s two main parties, reportedly paid a monthly stipend to Malik Ishaq, who was just detained in connection with a bombing that killed almost 90 people. PML (N)’s arrangements with Ishaq’s banned Shiite-killing outfit, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, are in place for the elections due this year; and, as a likely harvester of votes, Ishaq enjoys near-perfect immunity.
Mainstream politics in Indonesia, as in Pakistan, were free of murderous Islamic extremists well after independence in the late 1940s. It was an insecure dictator, Suharto, who inaugurated the Islamization of Indonesia, a constitutionally secular state, in an attempt to give himself legitimacy and redirect the growing appeal of political Islam, part of a worldwide trend in the 1980s.
But the lifting of restrictions on political activity since Suharto’s fall in 1998 brought other actors on stage, including: the now-suppressed terrorist outfit Jemaah Islamiyah, which was involved in the Bali bombings in 2002; the Islamic Defenders Front, a militia that tries to regulate the morals of Indonesians by attacking massage parlors and nightclubs; and the Justice and Prosperity Party, which won 9 percent of the popular vote in national elections in 2009.
Most importantly, many mainstream parties with secular traditions have gone garishly Islamic in a desperate attempt to distract voters. Local governments have enacted harsh sharia laws while the central government turns a blind eye to attacks by thugs on churches.
One reason for the growing tolerance of intolerance is political fragmentation in both Indonesia and Pakistan. No party enjoys a broad enough base to govern confidently. All are forced to rely on a variety of formulas and gimmicks, including populist welfare programs, promises of regional autonomy and crooked deals with extremists, in a dash for electoral majorities.
It doesn’t help that political parties are basically patronage-dispensing machines for old and new elites, with the capture of state power as their main aim. Ideologies and principles rarely matter in what is seen as a zero-sum game in which votes are aggressively bartered -- when not literally bought.
In this dog-eat-dog world, standing up politically for the Shiites and Ahmadis can be more trouble than it’s worth; and it’s easier to bet on the possibility that the rabid anti- Shiites might just bring in a few votes in places traditionally dominated by Shiite landlords.
Illiberal politics pays -- and not just in an Islamic country. A purely formal democracy, one not underpinned by institutions and notions of justice and fairness, can breed monsters anywhere.
Indeed, India’s prime minister-in-waiting Narendra Modi, whose alleged complicity in the deaths of almost 2,000 Muslims in his state in 2002 seems to help rather than hinder him, is South Asia’s true master of the brutal calculus of sectarian politics; his perfectly calibrated callousness toward religious minorities and the poor is now matched by brimming business- friendliness that endears him to big Indian conglomerates.
Democracy is undermined not so much by Islam, or for that matter Hindu extremism, as by ruthlessly self-interested elites who hijack the political process, using all available means to secure their dominance...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-03/how-democracy-kills-in-indonesia-and-pakistan.html
According to World Values Survey done by two Swedish researchers, India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong by far the least tolerant.
In only three of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbor of a different race. This included 43.5 percent of Indians, 51.4 percent of Jordanians and an astonishingly high 71.8 percent of Hong Kongers and 71.7 percent of Bangladeshis.
Unfortunately, the Swedish economists did not include all of the World Values Survey data in their final research paper. So I went back to the source, compiled the original data and mapped it out on the infographic above. In the bluer countries, fewer people said they would not want neighbors of a different race; in red countries, more people did.
Pakistan, remarkably tolerant, also an outlier. Although the country has a number of factors that coincide with racial intolerance – sectarian violence, its location in the least-tolerant region of the world, low economic and human development indices – only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbor of a different race. This would appear to suggest Pakistanis are more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/
hmmm not sure why PK is blue. I'm sure PK would rank low in religious tolerance.
Faraz: " hmmm not sure why PK is blue. I'm sure PK would rank low in religious tolerance."
It appears that there is a small but militant minority in Pakistan that is highly intolerant. Here's what the report says: Pakistan, remarkably tolerant, also an outlier. Although the country has a number of factors that coincide with racial intolerance – sectarian violence, its location in the least-tolerant region of the world, low economic and human development indices – only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbor of a different race. This would appear to suggest Pakistanis are more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch.
Here's a TOI story on religious discrimination in India:
For India, international recognition of its free and pluralistic society has always been hard to come by and while things are changing, they are clearly changing slowly. A study carried out by Washington-based Pew Research Centre, the highly respected US thinktank, said India is next only to Iraq when it comes to social hostility and religious discrimination perpetrated by individuals and groups.
The study titled `Global Restrictions on Religion' took into account the situation in as many as 198 countries, North Korea being the only notable exception, to derive the conclusion. India was just below Iraq and well above countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan when it came to social hostility in the country. Pakistan is at the third place right below India.
The study, which claims to cover 99.5% of the world population, deals with restrictions imposed on religion not just by social groups and individuals but also by the government. Even in the case of government induced restrictions, India fares badly with its position in the top 40 countries out of the 198 mentioned.
Even though the report says that "the highest overall levels of restrictions are found in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, where both the government and society at large impose numerous limits on religious beliefs and practices'' India is ranked well above them in the social hostility index.
While India has fared badly on both, China has done remarkably well when it comes to social hostility even though it has done badly in the government imposed restrictions section. "Vietnam and China, for instance, have high government restrictions on religion but are in the moderate or low range when it comes to social hostilities. Nigeria and Bangladesh follow the opposite pattern: high in social hostilities but moderate in terms of government actions,'' it says.
The report clubs India with Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and Bangladesh as countries where large segments of the population want to protect the special place of one particular religion. This is how it explains the high social hostility index for these countries. "Many of the restrictions imposed in these countries are driven by groups pressing for the enshrinement of their interpretation of the majority faith, including through Shariah law in Muslim societies and Hindutva movement in India which seeks to define India as a Hindu nation,'' says the report....
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-12-22/india/28103295_1_india-fares-hostility-restrictions
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