He is what we say he is….
While growing up in urban Faisalabad, the heart of industrial Punjab. I grew up listening to the gruesome stories of sectarian violence, which was prevalent in the 80s and 90s. I personally know some people who have lost their loved ones to extremism. The issue of militant sectarianism has toned down by a lot but the psychological or sentimental hostility still persists. For example, in the recent Muharram, we saw huge unrest regarding a particular issue and the threat of religiously motivated violence started to loom over our heads again. Bigoted hashtags and challenges started trending on Twitter and Facebook and the nation seemed to be more divided than before in the time of a pandemic where unity is badly needed.
Here are some statistics:
This sort of mentality is not directed towards one particular group but there are many other groups that have faced discriminatory behavior. For example, Qadianis, have faced persecution and have been discriminated against at the highest constitutional level. The Hindus and Christians have had to face forced conversions and have been exploited by a few particular laws.
Pakistan is the country in which the biggest problems are hunger, poverty, education, health, and social harmony. Given the aforementioned former problems, active participation of youth which comprises over half of the nation’s population. In such circumstances, social peace is a must to strengthen human development. Here, the issues of ethnic and sectarian divide combined with power politics and demagoguery stymie the progress that is meant to achieve the goal of human development.
I do not intend on getting into how we got here, what matters is that the problem persists and we need to do something about it.
So you must be thinking what is it that we can do to resolve this?
Seems like a hard thing to do, how can one change the beliefs that millions might hold sacred?
The first step, which I believe is always starting from within, then your surroundings, and the next step is to make an impact socially, in your domain of influence.
I want to work on a relatively new idea in Pakistan i.e., Lobbying. What is lobbying, you may ask. According to Brittanica,
‘Lobbying, any attempt by individuals or private interest groups to influence the decisions of government; in its original meaning, it referred to efforts to influence the votes of legislators, generally in the lobby outside the legislative chamber. Lobbying in some form is inevitable in any political system’
In simple words, it is influencing the legislators and legislation by highlighting the severity, importance, and gravity of the situation. A form of it already exists in Pakistan who are commonly known as ‘pressure groups’ but they are mainly limited to economic issues such as ‘trader groups’.
We can arrange meetings with the relevant people and apprise them of our and society’s concern and its imperativeness for a peaceful and prosperous environment in which we will be able to focus on our growth in science and technology and ultimately, our economy and peacefulness and tolerance!
I feel that by doing this we’ll be contributing to society in a positive way and also fulfill our responsibility of being dutiful citizens.
