The story of a nightmare

with dead bodies arrived at stations.

Indeed, the dream lived on into the 1950s, when it was forecast by international analysts that Pakistan had the potential to prove an economic success story. Today, of course, we know this has not happened.

What we need to admit, openly and loudly, is that we are living today in a nightmare; an especially macabre, terrifying nightmare from which we cannot wake up.

The nightmare is our reality. There is no way of shaking it off or sitting up to sip some cold water, knowing it will then go away. It is here to stay. We have waited too long. The question now is whether the nightmare can be swept away. The dream of course will be even harder to reconstruct

In the face of all that has happened recently, we need to revisit this dream. The question arises whether it was realistic at all. Perhaps it was. But we have seen so much mis-governance and a deliberate effort begun in the 1980s to promote extremism that the dream has more or less been strangulated and killed. Even wisps of it barely float around anymore. More of these wisps vanished with the latest outrage against a minority community in Lahore’s Joseph Colony, where on Saturday a mob of some 3,000 people burnt over a hundred Christian homes following an accusation of blasphemy. Other such incidents have occurred before. The fact that no one has been convicted for the 2009 arson attack in Gojra, when eight Christians were burnt alive after a mob set fire to their homes is one reason why the Badami Bagh tragedy has taken place.

It is also true that while the teenage girl with Down’s Syndrome, Rimsha Masih, accused of blasphemy on the outskirts of Islamabad last year was set free after it was found that the local cleric had made a malicious and false accusation, few know that the Christians who fled in fear from Rimsha’s impoverished village still live in ramshackle tents in a camp community. They are too afraid to return to their village, and they have received no real help from any quarter.

It is hard to even narrate all that forms a part of the nightmare. We have the killings of Shias in Quetta and Karachi; we have other acts of violence against Ahmadis and against Hindus in Sindh. Yes, some of these events make headlines. But then they are forgotten, banished to smaller and smaller print and consistently the government fails to act. After the Lahore attack, condemnations have come in, but no one is convinced that the judicial commission set up by the Punjab government will serve any real purpose. Similar commissions established in the past have been ineffective; and even when the findings they put forward are good, these are rarely implemented. Some voices speak up but it is the same voices over and over again, and too few political parties or mainstream leaders are willing to speak.

Perhaps not entirely unnaturally, the examples of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti scare them. But if our nation is to be