There’s a great deal of sociopolitical overlap when it comes to India and Pakistan – religion is a sensitive and volatile subject in both countries. However Rajkumar Hirani, despite all the protests from the right wingers, able to push the envelope and exercise his artistic freedom of expression to make a film that is currently looking at being the highest grossing Bollywood film ever. And inevitably, when a film has such a huge impact, it fuels social change. So what’s the difference? Why is that films like PK emerge in India, but not in Pakistan? That’s the elephant in the room – secularism. The very thing that prevented the angry right wingers from banning the film in India, and prompted the Supreme Court to rightly dismiss their case on grounds of artistic rights of freedom of expression and secular values.
Cut to Pakistan. Recently, Aamir Liaquat’s show hosted a bunch of mullahs who spewed the worst kind of venom against the Ahmadiyya community and incited violence against them on the leading TV channel in Pakistan. And this inevitably followed an Ahmadi being killed. Although the channel has offered a public apology and an FIR has been filed against Liaquat and the cleric, the very reason this furious and sad predicament took place was due to the sheer absence of secular values, or a social setting that is not sensitized to secular values. When a diverse range of critical opinions are suppressed, the bigoted ones that grow within the system thrive. This is the key problem that is being constantly evaded when it comes to the question of extremism or fundamentalism in Pakistan, as the lack of a secular framework creates the hotbed for religious fundamentalism, and ultimately extremism.
Admittedly, the framework of secularism in India is flawed. And freedom of speech and expression is far from absolute. The social climate is far from ideal when it comes to sensitive social, political or religious issues. Many had called for boycott of Haider for political reasons and now it’s PK for both ‘hurting’ religious sentiments and xenophobia.
However, even within that existing – albeit flawed – framework, people, including artists, can work to push the envelope can fuel social change to whatever extent it is possible. This is rather a pre-requisite to tackle the ingrained prejudice and corruption – be it for activists or artists. And without this, there’s no ground to build progressive change on in any society, let alone Pakistan.
Schadenfreudist Nerdocrat is a part time blogger, who likes inflicting his uniformed opinions on the world, and a full time pseudo philosopher. Follow him on Twitter