Silence Must Be Heard
Good morning and AssalamAlekum Ladies and Gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure to represent an elite university at another elite university however as I speak these words, another Christian house has been ransacked, another neighbourhood ravaged, another bus of Hazaras has been shot up, another sole breadwinner eliminated, another family has been shredded by a Hellfire missile, another father and son exterminated for their beliefs. Welcome to the |slamic Republic Of Pakistan where savagery, hate, barbarianism and injustice are the order of the day. All these maladies, all these evils which have eaten through the fabric of this diverse and varied society, hollowing its roots to an extent where the country teeters on the edge of dismemberment and obliteration are of our own making and shoot from one and one spring alone. Silence.
Silence of those who were the armor of civilization, silence of those who could’ve vetoed the insatiable massacre of humanity , silence of those who proclaimed themselves selected and most importantly the silence of those who called themselves the children of Adam. This nation, this land, this state which was born from the womb of injustice, of wrong, of prejudice quickly forgot what our forefather had stood on and what slogans they had raised when , we, the populace were the ones being persecuted, subjugated. Today, decades later it is us who are the persecutors; it is us who are the subjugators. Every second ,every moment we sit without acting, without defending those in need, we are as guilty as blameworthy as the ones who pull the trigger or swing the sword.
“When people refuse to speak out for too long, it's like water that's stagnant and starts to rot!” is August Strindberg’s grave saying that comes to mind when one witnesses the involuntary acceptance of violence, corruption, vice and dishonesty. We as a nation have the uncanny custom of accommodating what comes our way, accepting what we are subjected to. It is our silence, our calm which adds fuel to the fire of fraud, injustice, deceit and violence.
Tell me ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and colleagues, how many of us took to the streets, how many of us refused the comfort and safety of our homes to protest for those who could not, to object to cruelty and corruption, to demonstrate against injustice and intolerance. Tell me how many of us raised our fists, how many of said no to the pain and sorrow when hundreds of Hazaras were killed in Quetta ? Remind me how many of us raised a voice, declared our detestation or even affirmed our stance against the guilty when a man who served humanity, healed the pain and his minor son, whose only offence was his belief were slaughtered in broad daylight by those who want to see us burn. Tell me fellows, how many of us raised a hue and cry or stood to shield those whose only crime was being from a different sect ? We, the nation, the people refuse to learn from the unending scripts of history, from the infinitesimal journals of time, we refuse to learn, to acknowledge that if we lay down before maltreatment, before inhumanity, before cruelty before malice, our time too shall come and then, then Ladies and gentlemen no one shall raise a voice or cry for us, we forget my friends, my colleagues, that if today it is them, tomorrow it shall be us.
It is time, thus, O citizens of this great and wronged land, of this mighty nation that we stand for those, who cannot stand, hold a shield for the minorities, root for those who are the weakest, cover those who ethnicities, those sects, those races for whom we must shout out aloud. Let us wipe away this corruption, this wrong, this malice, this pain, this hatred, this malevolence, this hurt, this injustice , let us shatter this silence, let us destroy this stillness of death, so when the time comes, we too can say we stood for justice, we stood for right, we stood legitimacy, we stood for truth Ending with a quote from the infamous advocate of peace and justice, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”