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Thursday March 28, 2024

Mourn, introspect and change

Let us mourn and cry together. Once we are able to control our tears let us introspect together. Onc

By Harris Khalique
December 24, 2014
Let us mourn and cry together. Once we are able to control our tears let us introspect together. Once we are through with the introspection let us change ourselves. If the Peshawar school massacre is not the bloodiest event in our history in terms of death toll, it is the most brutal and vicious act of terrorism we have experienced as a nation.
About 150 innocent young students of the Army Public School, Peshawar, their brave teachers and courageous principal not only perished in a cowardly and senseless show of violence, the way the terrorist operation was carried out makes our blood boil on the one hand and sets in an all-pervasive sadness on the other.
There is so much to mourn and cry for. The children in their school uniforms were shot point blank and their bodies were heaped up. It is said that those who were still found to be moving unconsciously after being shot were pulled out of the heaps and shot again. The teachers were burnt alive. There are perhaps a couple of students left from the ninth grade who are still alive. Students from other grades were also killed.
The victims had played no role in the politics of Pakistan ever, in the policy decisions the powerful have made in their country before some of them were even born and certainly they had no idea of why they were being targeted. They had a life waiting for them. Their parents were running around in frenzy and horror when the news reached them and when they arrived at the site of the school. Some lost one child, some more. One family lost three sons. A mother died of heart attack after losing her only son. If those of us who have not lost a child or a family member find our tears not drying up, we can very well imagine what is happening with those who have suffered directly. Life will never be the same for them.
There is so much to introspect about – less so for citizens at large and more importantly for decision-makers and opinion leaders, the politicians, military generals, clerics, media personnel, social commentators, academics and writers – about what we have done to ourselves, our country and our society. The subsequent actions continuously taken by our privileged classes to preserve the unjust economic order and unfair class divisions, perpetuating the system that makes a few rich and powerful and keeps the most dispossessed and helpless, leads to an inherent political expediency. This political expediency to safeguard the vested interests of elite and their junior partners – the affluent middleclass – nurtures inequality. Inequality breeds anger. Anger breeds intolerance. Intolerance breeds extremism. Extremism breeds violence. Violence grows into terrorism. Henceforth, a hotbed for terrorists is created.
Nevertheless, it is not just about poverty and inequality. It has many other dimensions. While the young from the struggling classes have provided the cannon fodder for terrorism, a large part of the confused middleclass has contributed no less to firing the cannon. Their myopic worldview, intolerance in the name of faith and paranoia caused by the perception that the rest of the humanity is conspiring against us has provided legitimacy for such acts.
The elite in Pakistan is now notorious for the disconnect it has with the rest of the society and its ills. A few from the richest of Pakistanis share any common vision and idea or social and political interests with the rest of the population. However, modern societies are defined by the thinking and conduct of their middleclass. A large section of the Pakistani middleclass, affluent and not-so-affluent alike, are prejudiced to the hilt.
The prejudice is multifaceted. There is no shame in aligning themselves with the elite by shabbily treating fellow citizens belonging to the struggling classes. When it comes to dealing with non-Muslim Pakistanis, they, along with the Muslim working class which follows their masters, exhibit the worst forms of intolerance and bias. Leave alone those belonging to other faiths, middleclass families belonging to the majority sect or a sub-sect within the majority, consider minority Muslim sects as misguided and intolerable if not resorting to outright condemnation for them.
Those calling the policy shots since our birth as a nation have only brought us shame and humiliation. This remains another matter if we continue to blame others for all our defeats, our misdemeanours and our failings. After all, there are people in our country who still believe that Apollo did not land on the moon but in some rocky uninhabited tract of Balochistan.
A state created in the name of religious freedoms, minority rights, provincial autonomy and social justice, as spelled out in the Lahore resolution of 1940, ironically did to its majority of citizens exactly what it was not created for. Against the wish and will of the founding father, who had articulated his vision clearly in the first speech he made to the first Constituent Assembly as its president, the state took a sharp turn to becoming a confused theocracy with no equal citizenship for its inhabitants – in terms of faith as well as in terms of social class – soon after he was unceremoniously sent off.
No conscientious citizen of the state of Pakistan can ever forget that the founding father was received by no one important at the Mauripur airbase in Karachi in September 1948 except for his sister. The ambulance that went to receive the ailing man ran out of fuel on its way to the Governor General’s House.
To sustain their grip over power, it was no one else but the associates of the founding father, the imported Muslim League leadership, the clerics and the feudal lords of the then West Pakistan who started using religion. They were the ones who brought military into politics as well. Soon after, military generals usurped power of a country founded by a constitutionalist who had emphasised time and again that they should remain out of the political arena. The military generals had the civilian bureaucracy colluding with them. There were politicians and judges who supported them.
During civilian power interludes, no major policy shifts were observed either. Even in places where civilians could not blame the military, like in provision of fundamental municipal services, promoting a truly progressive narrative in society and pursuing a comprehensive pro-people economic agenda – barring PPP’s first term when socialism was half-heartedly experimented with.
Fast forward. What we find ourselves trapped in today is a quagmire of illiteracy, poverty, hate and intolerance. There are militias that rule our society and there are mafias that rule our economy. So where do we go from here? The state needs to eradicate not only terrorism but the roots of terrorism. It has to change the narrative. Pakistan cannot survive – let alone flourish – if the institutions of state, both military and political alike, do not change the narrative about the country’s existential paranoia.
In international relations, no country is either a perpetual friend or a perpetual enemy. It is the interests of the people living in these states that define the relationships. With India, before we push for signing a no-war and no-first-nuclear-strike pact, we should have a no-covert-war and no-proxy-war pact. It is time for powerful institutions in the two countries to think for once about the 500 million living below the poverty line and bury the hatchet for their sake. With Afghanistan and Iran, we need to build trust and confidence through purposeful action, not just words. If we sort out our issues in the immediate neighbourhood, we will find more strength in dealing with the US, the other western powers and China.
Internally, there is a need to overhaul the societal narrative and make it inclusive and plural. We need to bring an end to hate speech and hateful public messaging through media, and school and madressah curricula. Essentially, in our homes, if we teach or demonstrate to our children that whoever is different from us is not just different but absolutely wrong, fragmentation and intolerance will never end. Extremism will never end and violence will never end.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com
The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.