The question that how much hatred, based on ethnicity and sectarianism, could damage a society could be answered by a common man living in Pakistan. The ghost of sectarianism has been haunting every corner of the country while the ethnic violence has happened even with state support as well!
Lets overlook for a while how much blood have been spilled in the history of the country, from massacres in Bangladesh; killing of Balochs and Punjabis in Balochistan; Pathans and Mohajirs in Karachi, in order to evaluate the impact of these ethnic and sectarian based violence on intellectual capacity of the people.
In case of terrorism, the citizens are generally not directly involved in any kind of interaction except one being the marauder and the other being the victim. The victims don’t know who were the killer/killers and at least apparently the terrorists don’t know their victims.
However, the interaction between people belonging to different sects and ethnic backgrounds is a commonplace event from academic institutions and working places to a group of friends.
No one could deny the fact that when two persons meet, let it be at a university or an office, both would soon prejudice one another after knowing the sect or ethnic background.
While, being in a circle of colleagues, one have to be extra cautious to know the religious and political inclination and affiliation to speak one’s mind. Even being a student of research, it doesn’t give you a privilege to speak your mind freely without erecting barriers to imagination, which thus obstructs intellectual capacity to develop.
Although similar are the feeling and emotions and the divine corporeal artistry, when we interact one another, we have such vast differences as if the person of the other sect or ethnic background has been living somewhere other than this world.
On the other hand, the westerners are trying to erase these intellectual barriers by denying its very existence with their secular assertions. They have been trying hard and have achieved many milestones. Although there are some social side-effects, but still they have conquered the worlds of imagination with their intellectual masterpiece mainly with pen and somewhat with media contemporarily.
The existence of religious beliefs and other ethnic customs and traditions are beating with the heart of the people here and denying this reality would not do any good. ‘Secularization’ could not be the answer for removing intellectuality barriers and help society to thrive. Religions were there thousands of years back and will be there if the Earth survives another thousand years in future.
The answer to it is as simple as that that people should learn, how to bring up their children without hate for others. To do that, they only need to practice it themselves. Until now, we have only mastered the art of hiding our hate for others. It is time we point out the context, which provides the window for hatred to enter into communities, so forcefully that it restricts intellectual capacity.
Unless we don’t speak and don’t communicate freely, how will we be able to explore the imaginations of people around us and mutually enhance the horizons of our thoughts and be more creative.
When we compare ourselves with the westerners and with people of Japan or of Korea and Singapore, we stand nowhere near to them, but with few exceptions. We must realize this fact, and as a nation we should now stand, and stand high enough not to let ethnicity and sectarianism haunt us anymore so that we could thrive intellectually and could be known as ‘Pakistanis’ for some good reasons.
