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Don't shoot the messenger
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Shandana Minhas
Simi Garewal is an Indian celebrity familiar to many Pakistani's for her talk show, Rendezvous with Simi Garewal, which used to air on a satellite channel some time ago. If the details are a bit vague, easily forgotten, it's because the show was too. There was, according to people I know who watched it, a lot of white, a lot of 'aren't we all just the luckiest people alive' and- in one episode featuring Imran Khan- a lot of simpering.
But Ms Garewal's soft focus interest in the hearts, minds (and pectorals) of Pakistanis is apparently a thing of the past, given that she now wants to 'carpet bomb' us. During an interview with India's NDTV last Sunday she said: "Go to the Four Seasons and look down from the top floor at the slums around you. Do you know what flags you will see? Not the Congress's, not the BJP's, not the Shiv Sena's. Pakistan! Pakistani flags fly high!... You know what I think? We should carpet-bomb Pakistan. That's the only way we can give a clear message."
She responded to subsequent cries of 'Er…what?!' by saying "My suggestion is that the Indian army should go into POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir), do the job and come back without harming the country or its people." Providing further details of how exactly this cunning plan might come to fruition, given that Pakistan was a nuclear power not liable to take Indian incursions lying down, Ms Garewal demonstrated a logic as impeccable as her accent: "But can't we do that invisibly? Hasn't the US army gone in and uprooted the training camps situated in the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan? If the US can do that, why can't we?" I for one immediately felt sympathy rather than irritation towards Ms Garewal after reading her clarification. Someone who thinks the American violations of our territorial sovereignty are invisible probably thinks carpet bombing is a kind of benevolent reupholstering.
So thank you for the offer to (literally) put our house in order Ms Garewal, but if there is any redecorating to be done, we are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. Once the Indian government stops distracting us, and its constituents, with its sabre-rattling and provides solid, irrefutable evidence of our involvement that is. I hope my friends across the border will forgive my scepticism, but there is the strange case of the Samjhota Express and other incidents and details to consider before affixing blame, all of which were excellently summarized by Ayesha Ijaz Khan in her December 2 article in Counterpunch.
Ms Garewal's words, and those of countless others like her in both countries who seem compelled to shriek their hatred stridently from the closest media platform post terrorist strike, make it that much harder for those who want peace to be heard over the cacophony. The irony is, most provocative comments come from a place of pain and loss as much as they do from fear and loathing - except for mine, they just come from a place of inappropriate flippancy and a need for attention - but a ruthless response to suffering perpetuates suffering rather than alleviating it. Case in point, Israel. Or America. In fact, any number of 'democracies' across the globe. Dictatorial, authoritarian, religious regimes do their worst to their own, but a lot of world powers seem to have developed their own societies by exporting their chaos. Would India's democrats too like that to be the penultimate, defining characteristic of a state governed by the people, for the people? And does 'the people' not include all its people?
But it is not my intention, or my business, to lecture a neighbour on the problems in its char diwari, any more than it is my neighbour's business to lecture me. Lecturing, grandstanding, body slamming, is part of the problem not the solution. We know - from prolonged, bloody, ongoing experience - about the divisive, brutalizing effect of violence, where an explosion, a gunshot or two, can strip the concrete edifice of civilization we so assiduously build, exposing the bare skin and bared teeth of primitive man, broken into tribe/family/clan/sect, friend or enemy, us or them.
That grievously expensive, painfully gained knowledge is why our hearts and prayers go out to those across the border who have paid a terrible toll for the actions of madmen, and why we agree with them when they say justice should be done. It is also the reason Thomas L Friedman's barely disguised prejudice in a column for the New York Times on December 3, calling all Pakistanis, rankled in a way that statements from disoriented, traumatized Mumbai dwellers didn't. Mr Friedman, who is an experienced foreign affairs commentator and author, not only ignored protests/vigils/peace initiatives organized by Pakistanis after the Mumbai carnage he also implied that Islam as a religion and Pakistan as a nation support terrorism and the world would take our condolences more seriously if we lit more candles and stopped spiking our breastmilk with Extract of Crazy Murderous Muslim Person.
"On Feb 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)… When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?... I am still hoping -- just once -- for that mass demonstration of "ordinary people" against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India's sake, but for Pakistan's sake. …Why? Because it takes a village. The best defence against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers -- and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or "explain" their activities….at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn't dare do or say."
If there is ever a global village, I nominate Thomas L Friedman for the position of its idiot.
The writer's first novel, Tunnel Vision (2007), was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Email: shandana.minhas@gmail.com
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