The ban is more of a necessity…. Perhaps?

The general populace, namely the ‘Ziafied’ fundoos are always ready to go out and resort to hooliganism, whether it is a protest regarding some incident in Palestine, or a horrific incident or crises within Pakistan or the most touching and emotional for them, blasphemy. Although there are those as well, who in order to escape the shenanigans, simply refuse to get out of their houses in the name of any protest or demonstration.

Nonetheless, it should be common knowledge by now that any untoward incident, especially related to blasphemy is going to result in massive loss because of the ones who find it their duty to go about the country wielding a stick and bringing any ‘infidel’ on the true path. (Even if that infidel is thousands of miles away…)

Here… Let us not forget the Danish cartoon incident.

Also let us remember that we are mostly uneducated, and have no control over our religious sentiments. The ‘we’ here is not personal, but encompasses the masses. After keeping the majority of the masses, uneducated and deprived of basic necessities we must not expect them to behave rationally. (And no I do not find it only the States duty to do everything… we do take an oath when we sign our Matric and Inter forms, that we will make sure to educate at least one person… and yes I find there is a difference between educated and literate….)

So, coming back to the blasphemy issue, the enlightened must rationalize the issue in light of the conditions within our country. The matter has to be looked at contextually, rather then myopically and as per the standards of a first world country. The differences between the developed and the developing countries are thousands of miles apart, therefore the problem of ‘banning facebook’ if looked within the Pakistani paradigm, and the precedent blasphemy cases would make far more sense, then it does while analyzing it according to the western context.

However, having said this, it is also necessary that such steps are imposed after taking the general public into confidence. It would have been far saner to inform the public that the reason such steps are being taken was to keep everybody out of mischief, and also to save the national exchequer as well as the people themselves from losing thousands of rupees, in case their cars got burnt or their houses broken into or their businesses attacked.