Dawn Editorial 20 November 2019

Quality of discourse

THE last few weeks have been tense for Pakistan.
The ferment in the political situation manifested itself in the JUI-F dharna and its corresponding turbulence on the ground and on the negotiating table. This tumult coincided with the bail of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the ensuing legal tug-of-war unleashed by the indemnity bond issue. Most people involved in these unfolding developments had strained nerves and frayed tempers. Stress does take its toll.
Stress, however, should not find expression in individuals whose every word has ramifications far beyond those within physical hearing distance.
We do not know if it was stress or something else that provoked Prime Minister Imran Khan to let loose on the opposition in his speech on Monday, but whatever it was it did no favour to a leader who is expected to hold his composure no matter how testing the times. Mr Khan, inaugurating a motorway project, was expected to talk about his government’s performance, which he did at the start of his speech.
But then he went into a higher gear, lashing out at all his political opponents and repeating that he would spare no one.
He reserved the harshest words for Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Shahbaz Sharif and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. Perhaps the most unfortunate part of his tirade was his mocking of Mr Bhutto-Zardari by mimicking his Urdu accent. This act elicited guffaws from a partisan audience, but it left a sour taste in the mouth of most people.
The belligerence polluting our political landscape seems to have been injected with fresh toxins in these last few weeks.
The prime minister may have had his reasons for such renewed hostility, and many of these reasons may be valid. But the tone, tenor and choice of words to express this hostility were unfortunate.
During the time when he was on the container in 2014, Mr Khan used to resort to fiery and flammable rhetoric to attack his opponents. Oftentimes, his grandiloquence would splash out of the domain of acceptable decency but many would overlook this as the pronouncements of a man roaming the political wilderness.
Today, Mr Khan is the prime minister of Pakistan. This job requires him to be more circumspect in what he says, where he says it and how he says it. The high office he occupies demands from him a certain level of civility, propriety and dignity.
Mimicking an opponent and making fun of how he speaks does not fall within the parameters of such demands of his office.
Mr Khan may want to review this approach and help our national discourse recover some of its lost decorum.
Political differences are part and parcel of any elected dispensation. But Pakistan needs the rhetorical temperature to climb down a few degrees so that our politics does not boil over into a hate-war.

 
 

Chinese papers

IT’S there in black and white, 403 pages of a chilling prescription to erase the identity and ‘reprogramme’ the thinking of Chinese Muslim minorities — a dystopian ‘1984’ playing out in real life. Even more unfortunate, it now seems clear the strategy emanates from the very pinnacle of the Chinese government. A trove of internal documents from within the secretive Communist Party of China shared with the New York Times by an anonymous whistleblower has thrown a spotlight on the thought process that underlies the brutal repression of Muslim ethnic minorities, mainly Uighurs, and their mass detentions in ‘re-education camps’. They reveal a government that conflates extremists with peaceful, observant Muslims in China — religious persecution in its purest form. Among the pages are texts of secret speeches allegedly by President Xi Jinping laying out the security offensive against extremism in Xinjiang province. In one of them, “a period of painful, interventionary treatment” for those “infected” by “extremism” is advocated; in another to “…show absolutely no mercy”. The leaked documents also contain a guide for officials to use when dealing with queries from anxious Uighur youth when they find their family members missing: their relatives, the officials are instructed to say, were “infected” by the “virus” of Islamist radicalism for which they were required to be quarantined and cured. Moreover, Uighurs unwilling to accept the ‘official’ version of the situation should be cautioned their behaviour could prolong the detention of their family member/s.
For some time, accounts have been appearing in the Western media of a Uighur community under siege, and the detention camps in which as many as a million of them may be incarcerated. The stories have often been downplayed or dismissed as propaganda, usually by countries with high stakes in the world’s second-largest economy. China has denounced the exposé as an attempt to discredit its efforts against extremism which it has portrayed as a resounding success in Xinjiang — presumably as a result of a policy that is indeed entirely lacking in mercy. Significantly, however, it has not disputed the documents’ veracity. That makes it much more difficult to affect ignorance about the atrocities being inflicted on the Chinese Muslims. Like many other countries, Pakistan too has a spotty human rights record, but when it can speak out against the human rights violations of the Kashmiris and the Rohingya, can it stay silent about the Uighurs?

 
 

Dengue cases

THE outbreak of dengue across the country seems to have been particularly vicious this year. Around 50,000 cases have already been reported. This is almost double the number of people infected with the virus in the past decade. The last serious outbreak of dengue was recorded in 2011 when some 27,000 people fell ill. While health officials argue that the increase is partly due to a global surge in dengue cases in countries including Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — where the number of people affected is said to be higher than in Pakistan — it still does not condone the health authorities’ lackadaisical approach to a serious challenge. They failed to put in place preventive measures, although they had been warned last May of such an outbreak. WHO has declared dengue as one of the top 10 global public health threats; surely, the national and provincial health authorities could have ensured active vigilance and preventive measures before matters got out of hand. The communication gap between provincial health departments has also contributed to the increase in the number of cases. Although this time there appears to be an improvement in reporting mechanisms regarding the number of people afflicted in the country, experts argue that there are still several weak links in the disease surveillance system which need to be ironed out. Hopefully, the onset of winter will slow down the breeding of the disease-carrying mosquitoes in most of the country, although there are fears that this might not be the case in Karachi where a milder winter may not prevent mosquito breeding.
Though an Emergency Operation Centre dedicated to controlling the spread of dengue fever has been set up in Islamabad, it is not yet clear whether it is following a comprehensive plan to control the spread of the illness. Perhaps the EOC can begin work by verifying reports of two different strains of the dengue virus affecting patients and then share this information with health practitioners, along with putting out guidelines for treatment.

 
 

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