Author: Sultan Shahin
Publication: The Times of India
Date: March 19, 2001
THE Basant festival heralds the
end of winter and arrival of spring. It is celebrated in the entire sub-continent,
and particularly in Pakistan, with flying kites - perhaps because spring
generally brings a clear sky and just the right amount of wind. For its
fans, kite flying is pure fun. But it has become a serious, if not deadly
serious business in Pakistan this Basant. What used to be accepted traditionally
as an occasion for making merry, turned into an occasion for asserting
one's secular identity, reclaiming the country's sub-continental heritage,
or symbolically registering one's protest against efforts at regimentation
of the society. Shades of watching FTV or buying Valentine cards in India
this Spring?
The Jihadi mafia in Pakistan has
dubbed the age-old secular festival of Basant a Hindu festival. A columnist
of an Urdu daily has traced its origin to a 19th century blasphemer of
Prophet Mohammad. Thus anyone seen flying kites to celebrate the festival,
could be liable to the maximum punishment of death - a sentence that is
often carried out by Jihadis out of court. Thus it goes to the credit of
a large number of ordinary people, intellectuals and even the Chief Executive
General Pervez Musharraf that they have treated Basant normally, as an
occasion for just flying kites and making merry to mark the arrival of
spring at a time when, as columnist Kunwar Idris put it, nothing else happens
to make merry about.
General Musharraf went to Lahore
where Basant is celebrated most enthusiastically and attended two formal
functions on the eve of the grand occasion. Indeed, his government has
decided to promote Basant as a tourist attraction in Lahore, calling it
officially the Spring Festival.
From all accounts, Basant this year
was utter fun in Pakistan. Lahore looked quite spectacular. The weather
was divine and there was a tangible feeling of goodwill across the city.
All this made Kamran Shafi, a former diplomat and press secretary of former
prime minister Benazir Bhutto, quite nostalgic of the Pakistan of yore.
He wrote in a newspaper article: "It must be 1954 or thereabouts - a time
when this country of ours was a kinder, gentler place. While flying kites
was not considered a threat to Islam in those days, neither did the members
of one Muslim religious sect kill members of another Muslim sect. Politicians
did not feel the need to be protected from their own people by weapon-wielding
thugs; and the campuses were free of guns. Pakistan, all in all, was quite
a wonderful place, despite its kites!"
Several other Pakistani writers
have gone to great lengths to pay tributes to Basant. Mir Jamilur Rahman,
for instance, writes, "The idea that the people should have pleasure has
always been shocking to the clergy. Mullahs put forward a number of arguments
to dissuade the common people from kite flying. It was said that it is
a Hindu festival, many lose lives and many others are injured celebrating
it, it causes wasteful expenditure and is thus irreligious, and so on.
However, the Lahoris rejected all these sanctimonious sermons and celebrated
Basant with a zest that was never witnessed before".
Paying tributes to Basant is risky
business. One has to appease not only Islamists and Two-Nation theorists
but also those who are bent upon changing Pakistan's geography and want
to locate it in the Middle East. "Whether the rightists like it or not,
it is a fact that we have more cultural similarities with India than with
our Muslim brethren in Iran or Afghanistan. Who in Afghanistan or Iran
chews pan? Where else but only in the sub-continent the red chillies are
an essential ingredient of our food. Do Arabs wear dhoti, shalwar or sherwani?
Our marriage customs and funerary rituals are common with India except
for the religious part. We watch Indian movies and TV because they produce
entertaining and glamorous programmes. We understand the language and the
family problems they present are similar to ours. In which other country
is the saas-bahu relationship the subject of so many plays and movies?"
asks Rahman. But he still feels the need to insist: "In spite of all these
cultural similarities with India we are and will remain a separate nation".
It is tempting to scoff at the plight
of Pakistani intellectuals. But with 15,000 madrasas (religious seminaries)
producing on an average 500,000 graduates every year, adding to the 1.7
million trained Jihadis already in the country, it requires courage for
the liberal intellectuals to stand up to the Jihadi onslaught. If they
still cling to sub-continental traditions like Basant and defend it publicly,
we can only marvel at their guts and pray for their success.
