[The issue quickly
became a case for the city’s High Court, which said it would deliberate on a
petition, initiated by Mr. Butt and a coalition of religious conservatives, to
block the name change. That was in November, and the case still awaits a
hearing date. The provincial government has remained in tiptoe mode ever since.
“It is a very delicate matter,” said Ajaz Anwar, an art historian and painter
who is the vice chairman of a civic committee that is managing the renaming
process.]
By Salman Masood
 |
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
There is opposition to renaming a busy traffic
circle
in Lahore,
|
LAHORE, Pakistan — If ever a squabble over a street name could sum up a nation’s
identity crisis, it is happening in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital.
Late last year, a group
of Lahoris made progress in getting local officials to rename a busy traffic circle for Bhagat
Singh, a Sikh revolutionary who was hanged at the site by the British in 1931
after a brief but eventful insurrection against colonial rule. They see it as a
chance to honor a local hero who they feel transcends the ethnic and sectarian
tensions gripping the country today — and also as an important test of the
boundaries of inclusiveness here.
But in the Islamic
Republic of Pakistan, questions of religious identity also become issues of
patriotism, and the effort has raised alarm bells among conservatives and
Islamists. The circle was named in 2010 for Chaudhry Rehmat Ali, a Muslim
student who coined the name Pakistan in the 1930s, and there was an outcry at
the news that it might be renamed for a non-Muslim.
“If a few people decide
one day that the name has to be changed, why should the voice of the majority
be ignored?” asked Zahid Butt, the head of a neighborhood business association
here and a leader of the effort to block the renaming.
The fight over the
traffic circle — which, when they are pressed, locals usually just call Shadman
Circle, after the surrounding neighborhood — has become a showcase battle in a
wider ideological war over nomenclature and identity here and in other
Pakistani cities.
Although many of
Lahore’s prominent buildings are named for non-Muslims, there has been a
growing effort to “Islamize” the city’s architecture and landmarks, critics of
the trend say. In that light, the effort to rename the circle for Mr. Singh
becomes a cultural counteroffensive.
“Since the ’80s, the
days of the dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, there has been an effort that everything
should be Islamized — like the Mall should be called M. A. Jinnah Road,” said
Taimur Rahman, a musician and academic from Lahore, referring to one of the
city’s central roads and to the country’s founder. “They do not want to
acknowledge that other people, from different religions, also lived here in the
past.”
A recent nationwide
surge in deadly attacks against religious minorities, particularly against
Ahmadi and Hazara Shiites, has again put a debate over tolerance on the
national agenda. Though most Sikhs fled Pakistan soon after the partition from India in 1947, the fight over whether to
honor a member of that minority publicly bears closely on the headlines for
many.
A push to honor Mr.
Singh has been going on here for years. But it was not until the annual
remembrance of his birth in September that things came to a head. A candlelight
demonstration to support renaming the traffic circle had an effect, and a
senior district official agreed to start the process. As part of it, he asked
the public to come forward with any objections. The complaints started pouring
in.
Traders of Shadman
Market, the local trade group led by Mr. Butt, threatened a strike. Chillingly,
warnings against the move were issued by leaders of the Islamic aid group
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, largely believed to be a front for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Clerics
voiced their opposition during Friday Prayer.
The issue quickly became
a case for the city’s High Court, which said it would deliberate on a petition,
initiated by Mr. Butt and a coalition of religious conservatives, to block the
name change. That was in November, and the case still awaits a hearing date.
The provincial government has remained in tiptoe mode ever since. “It is a very
delicate matter,” said Ajaz Anwar, an art historian and painter who is the vice
chairman of a civic committee that is managing the renaming process.
Mr. Anwar said some
committee members had proposed a compromise: renaming the circle after Habib
Jalib, a widely popular postindependence poet. That move has been rejected out
of hand by pro-Singh campaigners.
Mr. Rahman and other
advocates for renaming the circle paint it as a test of resistance to
intolerance and extremism, and they consider the government and much of Lahore
society to have failed it.
“The government’s
defense in the court has been very halfhearted,” said Yasser Latif Hamdani, a
lawyer representing the activists. “The government lawyer did not even present
his case during earlier court proceedings.”
The controversy
threatens to become violent. On March 23, the anniversary of Mr. Singh’s death,
police officers had to break up a heated exchange between opposing groups at
the circle.
Mr. Rahman and the other
supporters have vowed to continue fighting, saying it has become a war over who
gets to own Pakistan’s history.
“There is a complete
historical amnesia and black hole regarding the independence struggle from the
British,” Mr. Rahman said, adding of the Islamists, “They want all memories to
evaporate.”
