I do not know how good a medicine man Dr Zulfiqar Mirza was. As a politician, however, he was a knight of the second order, owing his elevation or any importance he enjoyed to his dear friend the president. But as a fire-breathing, Quran-touching orator he has come into his own. In all its tempestuous history the MQM has been hit by no one as hard as Dr Mirza, although it remains to be seen whether his headlong attack leaves some kind of a permanent mark or is just a passing phenomenon.
But more than his MQM-bashing what is likely to transfix the attention of assorted aficionados is his candid admission that if the occasion demanded he entertained his friends, at his own expense, with drink and was not above taking the occasional glass himself.
Pakistani politicians, or indeed most people in public life, are mealy-mouthed. They don’t talk like this and in public at least are given to excessive displays of self-righteousness. Mirza’s declaration is a sign of his boldness and is a breath of fresh air. Standards of public life and public behaviour would improve if more people spoke like him. We know how widespread is the habit of drinking, especially amongst certain classes. But you won’t catch many people admitting to this in public. We’ve made a religion of hypocrisy and our forked tongues on this subject in no small measure contribute to this phenomenon.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously declared during a campaign rally in 1977 that, yes, he drank but not the blood of the people. The rightwing parties were up against him in that fateful election – fateful in the sense that it led directly to Gen Zia’s martial law, about the worst calamity that could befall a disaster-prone country. And they tried to exploit Bhutto’s throwaway remark to the full.
Not that it made much of a difference. The masses have other problems in life and they don’t wear religion on their sleeves. When Bhutto said what he did the average Pakistani could not suppress his laughter and there was a twinkle in his eyes. We are talking of more than three decades ago when things in general were far less frenzied than they are today. It is the lower-middle classes, and indeed the middle class as it has evolved in Pakistan, the breeding ground of hate and bigotry, the source of so much of the prevailing intolerance, which finds such honesty hard to stomach.
The Pakistan of today is a distorted country, swept by fear and hate. This makes Mirza’s admission all the more welcome. When two bottles of liquor (or was it wine?) were allegedly discovered from fetching Ms Atiqa Odho’s luggage at Islamabad airport and the Supreme Court, to widespread amusement, took suo motu notice of this incident, I asked in the National Assembly whether it wasn’t time to reconsider some of our social restrictions. An enterprising BBC man reported that I was advocating the repeal of the drinking laws, about which I had said not a word. I had made just a general observation. Just shows how the subject of drinking can get people worked up in the Islamic Republic.
But we seriously need to re-examine this issue from a pragmatic point of view. Prohibition hasn’t turned us into better Muslims. It has only made us greater hypocrites. Drinking while a big-time activity in Pakistan is a covert activity, carried on behind closed doors. This state of affairs while transforming bootleggers into very successful entrepreneurs is not very conducive to national honesty.
The surreptitiousness of the exercise also turns it into a big deal. You have to procure a bottle of some of Scotland’s mediocre best and this becomes a major undertaking. A country where something like drinking looms so large in the collective imagination can’t be a very healthy society.
We know how repression works. The tougher the restrictions on something, the greater the longing for the same thing. Too much license may not be a good thing but too much social repression, as in Saudi Arabia and to a milder degree in Pakistan, is also not a good thing. Sensible societies try to keep a balance between the two.
What we generally take to be the social sins are part of the human condition. They have been so since the beginning of time, certainly since the dawn of history. Much as unreconstructed moralists may wish it, there are things which sensible societies try to regulate, not eradicate, because they cannot be eradicated. Drinking is one such thing, the oldest profession another. The strictures against the former are far harsher in Saudi Arabia and Iran, each in their own way the redoubts of morality and correct Islamic behaviour (at least according to what they claim). But even there this ancient pastime goes on behind drawn curtains and closed doors.
Things are much more relaxed in the Gulf states, especially Dubai. Are they less Muslim for this? The social freedoms which prevail there do not cause any visible dent to the Islamic faith of the populace. We were also a pretty normal society back in the 50s, 60s and 70s (until we attracted the evil eye in 1977, since when we have travelled backwards in time and have known no peace). Our cities were fairly relaxed places and social freedoms up to a point were permitted without impairing our Islamic faith. People went to mosques and fasted in the month of Ramazan, although the holy fathers were not the nuisance they were to become in Zia’s time. But bars were open, as were a few nightclubs here and there, and procuring a drink was not the major enterprise that it is today.
In Ghalib’s timeless phrase “masjid ke zer-e-saya kharabat chahiye”...in the shadow of the mosque do I seek the solace of drinking, and Lahore’s Badshahi Mosque, one of the grandest in the world, and Heera Mandi nearby, almost cheek-by-jowl with the mosque, home to Lahore’s famed red-light area, were emblems of this conjunction. Pakistan was a tolerant place, a far cry from what our strategic grandmasters were to turn it into because of their Afghan and Kashmir adventures.
Bhutto banned drinking in 1977 and Zia, forever out to placate the religious lobby which was his constituency and his claim to legitimacy, passed the Hudood Ordinance in 1979 which, apart from other things, applied punitive penalties to the possession and use of liquor. We have had more than 30 years of experience to judge the effectiveness of the Hudood laws. The level of bribe-taking has sharply risen but the prevalence of drinking has not diminished. Why then have a law which promotes corruption?
There are many things which make Pakistan a bleak destination for any visitor. Prohibition is one of them. And so strong are the taboos underpinning this law that most of us don’t feel free even discussing it. We’ll talk endlessly about other issues but skirt around this one for fear of offending the licence-holders of ideology and morality. Perhaps it is too much to hope that this law will be repealed any time soon. More than ordinary people it is governments which are afraid of the moral custodians. So expecting boldness from governments is a futile hope. But at least this law can be relaxed allowing some openness to creep in.
Come to think of it, this fear of the gatekeepers of morality is misplaced. Jam Sadiq Ali as chief minister of Sindh allowed many liquor outlets to open in both Karachi and the Sindh interior. Many of them are still open, monuments to his memory. The heavens have not fallen and Sindh is not a more sinful place than other regions of Pakistan.
The strictures surrounding this subject should be broken. We need an honest debate on this issue. True, there are more serious problems bedevilling the Islamic Republic. But why on earth must we add to our problems by imposing totally unnecessary restrictions?
This is the only democracy in the world where prohibition is in place. Might this be one reason why our democracy doesn’t function as well as it should?