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The Right to Dissent

January 6th, 2011 | 8 Comments

By Raza Rumi

(The year 2011 will be celebrated worldwide as the centenary of the great poet of Southasia, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Himal‘s forthcoming January 2011 issue will carry cover features on Faiz and his poetry. Over the year, we will also be posting fresh material on our website www.himalmag.com.)

alt Over the course of human history, intellectuals and artists have helped broaden the scope of citizenship and the nebulous contours of citizen rights. Southasia is no exception. Despite its colonial past and internal fault-lines, it can boast of extraordinary individuals who have stood up against tyranny and reaffirmed the innate strength of the human spirit.

A tradition of resistance by artists and intellectuals that was built up in colonial times continues to thrive in the Subcontinent. Arundhati Roy in India remains undeterred despite being charged with sedition or ‘the attempt to excite disaffection towards the Governmentestablished by law in India’, a penal provision defined by the British colonial government in 1860. Her ability, and that of many others like her, to speak the truth to power and populism, reconfirms that humanism remains above notions of narrow nationalism. Roy’s latest act of criticising rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir has landed her in trouble with the guardians of patriotism, who have vociferously demonised her and trashed her worldview. Conversely, more and more people have also spoken in Roy’s favour, thereby weakening linear jingoistic narratives which rely on ultranationalist worldviews.

Asma Jahangir’s track record on human rights and fearlessness gives Pakistanis hope. She has unswervingly challenged military and civilian dictators alike, undeterred by the consequences of speaking out against autocrats. Her activism has not only saved minorities and women from brutal customary punishments and a coercive state apparatus, but consistently pushed for reaffirming the rule of law.

In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi has finally been freed after her dignified but determined refusal to submit to the military junta. Her defiance is legendary and will continue to inspire democrats in her country and elsewhere. The indomitable will of these women continues the glorious traditions of Southasia: to uphold the truth and resist until victory is in sight.

In Sri Lanka, where freedom of expression is increasingly under threat, individuals have stood up fearlessly against the abuse of power. Some, like Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of the Sunday Leader, have paid with their lives. It is never too late for those in other parts of the Subcontinent to look towards Bangladesh and remember the hundreds of intellectuals rounded up and executed outside Dhaka during the Liberation War in 1971. One momentous day of massacres, 14 December, is still observed as ‘Shaheed Buddhijibi Divas’ in Bangladesh, to honour the martyred intellectuals. President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives spent the better part of the 1990s as a prisoner of conscience for his anti-establishment views which he did not hesitate to make public through newspaper articles. In Nepal, civil rights activists of indomitable spirit have stayed the course for freedom to fell the Rana regime in 1950; to survive through three decades of the monarchist Panchayat till 1990; and to battle political violence, resurgent autocracy and never-ending anarchy since.

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On 24 December this year, Christmas Eve, in India, human-rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has worked as a doctor among the adivasis of Chhattisgarh for many long years, has been sentenced to life imprisonment. His case reminds us that repression and authoritarianism oftentimes come clothed in the garb of democracy and the rule of law. Sen was first arrested four years ago on flimsy charges; the real agenda was clearly to silence one of the best-known and vocalchampions of the rights of poor adivasis in the state of Chhattisgarh, and thus demonstrate the consequences of speaking up. He was imprisoned for over two years before he was granted bail by the Supreme Court. The sentence of life imprisonment just announced, based as it is on politically motivated charges, is a travesty and needs to be reversed. The Indian state’s persecution of Sen and countless other activists like him who have continued to speak up for the rights of the poor and marginalised, is unacceptable in any truly democratic and just society, and will not succeed in silencing those who dare stand up for the truth.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s hundredth birth anniversary will be celebrated this year across Southasia and the globe. His poetry of resistance, with its vigorous challenge to authoritarianism, is as relevant today as when it flowed from his pen several decades ago. Revered for having stood up to exploitation, injustice and state coercion, Faiz’s legacy lives on as scores of writers and artists in Pakistan and India continue to struggle for an equitable, plural and tolerant society. Not surprisingly, Faiz was imprisoned and declared persona non grata by the Pakistani state, in the vain hope that incarceration would still his sharp verse. But that only sharpened it; through the ages, dissent has only been fuelled by censorship and clampdown, and the human spirit has triumphed.

Besides the state, artists face dangers and threats from a new creed: the extremists and bigots who have made intolerance a political enterprise. Taslima Nasreen lives in exile, threatened by reactionaries in Bangladesh; and M F Husain, one of the greatest living Indian painters has in effect been banished for exercising his right to interpret his homeland and its deities. Intellectuals and mediapersons in Pakistan have been attacked and remain under perennial threat from extremist forces within the country. Burmese artists continue to be forced into exile, but they are not silenced. These artists have not allowed their creativity to ebb, for that would be a victory for those who seek to silence them. In many places, as in Nepal where King Gyanendra sought to impose autocracy, or in Pakistan where Pervez Musharraf was ascendant, Faiz comes back to life.

Postcolonial Southasia is grappling with multiple challenges and Faiz remains a torch-bearer for those striving for freedom of expression. The civil liberties enjoyed today by millions have only been achieved through decades-long struggles waged by public intellectuals, fearless activists and artists.Marking the centenary of Faiz, Himal celebrates this legacy of Southasia’s fight for freedom.

It is vital for the continued health of our societies to nurture freedom of expression and the right to dissent. There will always be courageous individuals who dream fearlessly and dare to speak. To quote Faiz’s eloquent lines from ‘Bol’,

Bol, ye thhoda waqt bahut hai
Jism-o zabaan ki maut se pehle
Bol ke sach zinda hai ab tak
Bol, jo kuch kehna hai, keh le.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue
Speak, ’cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak

Written by admin

Filed under: Uncategorized · Tags: Faiz, long, poetry, Southasia

8 Responses to "The Right to Dissent"

simply61 says:

January 6, 2011 at 9:32 am

Great read.Binayak’s case is the biggest miscarriage of justice even by our own miserable judicial standards.Hopefully,the public opinion and Supreme Court’s intervention might help reverse this.
ahmed bukhari says:

January 6, 2011 at 10:08 am

at this time when the media with the greatest audience by a very long way,the news channels are filled with justifications & excuses for ST’s murder,the blogs should have been shared as much as possible to reach whatever audience they can reach,but alas!! PTH still doesn’t have any sharing options,no email,no twitter,no facebook sharing facility from this blog itself.
the administrators of PTH should get a share option for this blog,like the one tribune has or tazeen’s blog has in which there are innumerable sharing options.
It’s a pity that when the cyberspace needed articles of sanity,a lack of sharing options on this blog hampered that.
salimbawany says:

January 6, 2011 at 10:29 am

the following is a collection of excellent articles on the state of our society,click on the links & share them thru facebook,email,twitter etc as much as possible:
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/05/salmaan_taseer_last_man_standing
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2040792,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/05/salman-taseer-murder-pakistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/05/pakistan-salman-taseer-liberal
http://www.newslinemagazine.com/2011/01/pakistani-writers-and-bloggers-react-to-salmaan-taseers-death/
censor says:

January 6, 2011 at 10:39 am

Different folks different strokes!

If the intellectuals and artists use their pen to put forth their view, then jihadis use their gun to do the same. The damage done by the pen has a much more devastating effect in the long run than the gun. Arundhati Roy came to Pakistan to learn about Taliban. Obviously she ran out of courage soon enough and made a hasty retreat otherwise she would be in heaven with Salman Taseer. Binayak Sen worked with the poor tribals and at the same time he was instrumental in helping the Maoists and their crazy idea of violent revolution. Both of these esteemed personalities are from the communist infested state of West Bengal should tell you something.

Pakistanis love to do the equal-equal game and try to make freedom fighters out of the terrorists in India. They use fancy ideas to hide behind their outdated communist and religious fanaticism but at the end of the day, they are using violence to bring a democratically elected government to it’s knees. If every Tom, Dick and Harry with a gun tries to have it’s way (as is evident in the land of pure), we will have no civil society left.

I am still waiting for the liberal Pakistanis speak up against the ISI and Hafeez Saeed and bring justice to the scores he helped murder in Mumbai. Or is it the case of “If he is a bastard, at least he is our bastard”.
Neighbor says:

January 6, 2011 at 10:59 am

Write to Dissent!
———————–

While it’s clear that Pakistan is certainly hurtling toward a disaster and the idea of free-thought, expression and dissent being systematically muzzled by religious fascism; web sites like PAK TEA HOUSE does really stand out as a beacon of hope!

I have been reading your posts for some time now and I see hope in the people like Raza Rumi, YLH (this brilliantly articulate chap certainly needs to moderate in a few areas else his sharp intellect would be categorized as devious rather than enlightening) and others not connected to your website like Nadeem Parcha.

The question that bothered me was that will such dissent alone – meaning in the net and a few columns in newspapers – will suffice to make people see sanity. I fear that the answer is no as from all I could read and observe a critical mass of the Pakistani society that includes quite a few opinion makers have crossed over into a dangerous territory from which an escape seems to be impossible in the near future.

The average Pakistani society’s fear of the god’s followers now seems to be more than that of the fear for the god himself. Added to that, not to be left alone, a good mass of the Pakistani society has taken upon itself to become intolerance complaint for the fear of being branded as an incomplete religious adherent.

The moment it happens, it’s going to be a very difficult task to roll it back as such compliance and a willful effort to exhibit those, by itself becomes a competitive affair between a person and his next door Abdul or Akram. Such a competition has clearly come to stay in Pakistan and folks like you that write sense are getting increasingly isolated and looked down.
Joseph Stalin, the father of modern day free-thought suppressors who in fact remodeled the medieval religious traditions of stifling societies to suit the new century, could not have hoped for a better picture than this. The society he wanted to create during the thirty’s and forty’s was one that started engaging in proving to the authorities as to how each is a better proletariat. The method to prove it of course was by spying on the neighbor and telling to the righteous NKVD that that guy is a capitalist loader or a revisionist or some other nonsense. This enterprise became so competitive at the Stalin himself wanted to tone this down as almost half the Soviet population was branded as enemy of the people. Mao took this one step further and succeeded in making the kids talk about their parents to the authorities and called it as Cultural Revolution.

Such a thing has now taken root in Pakistan.

Dissent against religious bigotry is now being branded as anti-religion and anti-Pakistan. The next step will be that such dissent against the people who propagate bigotry will also be branded as such and in the end will emerge a strong clique that are entirely criticize-proof!

At this point of time there is no Ayatollah Khomeni to lead such a group in Pakistan (or an equivalent Sunni bigot). This has saved the day for Pakistan till today (the reason for this is I guess is that Pakistan is not such a homogenous society with common cultures right across as many wrongly believe. Hence to bring a single religious figure as in Iran needs a clear dismantling of underlying unique cultures and superimposing them with Whabi Islam, so that a bulk of society can be made to connect with a single religious purpose and a single leader that connects to the purpose). But the moment such a figure takes the mantle, the criticize-Proof brigade would have found their prophet and Pakistan’s decent into absolute theocracy will be an absolute certainty. This has grave implications for the world and of course for Pakistan’s existence as a country itself. If it indeed happens Pakistan will become an Afghanistan multiplied by four.

This should not be allowed to happen and the only weapon that Pakistan has now are people like you that needs to step up your dissent without fear. (I am leaving out Pakistani army in this as from all I could see and read for the past few months, even they are struggling with an identity crisis and shortly they too are surely like to start engaging in competitive religiosity)!
When dissenters are slaughtered like this in your country you few people with such courageous spirit and genuine patriotism seem to be the last remaining hope.

Hence keep writing and find ways for your words to reach more people to save your country. Else you can surely kiss the Pakistan you know a final goodbye!

Write to Dissent!
Gorki says:

January 6, 2011 at 11:03 am

“The Indian state’s persecution of Sen and countless other activists like him who have continued to speak up for the rights of the poor and marginalised, is unacceptable in any truly democratic and just society, and will not succeed in silencing those who dare stand up for the truth….”

I agree with the above.
Dr. Binayak may or may not be a Maoist sympathizer but the evidence presented against him (and his track record as a social worker) suggests that he is a rare individual and a rare asset.
His sentencing is a tragedy for all Indians who believe in justice.
Fellow Pakistani says:

January 6, 2011 at 12:17 pm

Too bad, Faiz Ahmad Faiz nephew Salman Taseer won’t be celebrating it.
FAF and ST mothers were real sisters.
deepak75 says:

January 6, 2011 at 1:37 pm

It is quite rich when supposed & real intellectuals want the right to dissent but are not ready to be treated via the same system and social values that they claim to crusade for.

Why only the intellectuals? Everybody has a right to dissent and each and every human being should use it. We do not need to behave as tamed animals and be told out position. We should question and when needed, dissent.

That said, we should also understand that we are part of a democratic society to whose justice system we need to submit. In both cases of Arundhati Roy and Dr. Sen, the law needs to take its course. The law represents all people equally, including the strata that said persons claim to crusade for. So why raise the hue and cry when they have to follow the same legal course? That is why an appeal process for a higher court has been defined for the “non-intellectuals” – read the lesser mortals.

Afterall, exactly as they are asking for it, we all need to be equally treated. Or does it hamper the intellect style??