South Asians are at their humorous best when they try to look serious. As if the surgical strikes of Narendra Modi were not enough to amuse us, awards received by two honourable federal ministers have been found to be fake, received by financing the publication that bestowed them and the publication itself has turned out to be dubious.
Not to be left behind, Pakistan’s most serious and busiest man in the cabinet, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, jumped from one spot to another and tilted at yet another windmill – this time at a journalist. In the meantime, the Global Hunger Index issued its annual report, stating that every fifth person in Pakistan is hungry. Naturally, the last news happens to be the least important, not requiring any serious attention.
Let’s start with the man with the 56-inch chest on the other side of the fence at Wagah. “It was meant to be Narendra Modi’s moment of glory. Now it looks like a sham”, wrote Shivam Vij, a Delhi-based journalist, recently. As scrutiny over the claims of surgical strikes started, the ruling BJP and its allied organisations have tried to silence the debate by intimidating critics and invoking nationalism. The media, like always, is cheering the chest-thumping crowd.
In one interesting incidence, India’s leading television channel NDTV decided not to air an interview of Mr Chidambaram, former foreign minister of India, conducted by its star journalist Barkha Dutt. The reason was a point raised by Chidambaram about the surgical strikes. He told a newspaper that he had only stated that it might not be a bad idea to put out the evidence, not because he didn’t believe the Indian army, but merely to call Pakistan’s bluff.
If India can celebrate surgical strikes while relying on trusted Ayurveda techniques of conflict, why could Pakistan not win awards for monumental economic development while remaining at the bottom of the heap? A couple of weeks ago, two stars of Team Nawaz Sharif received prestigious awards from a prestigious publication linked to the IMF and the World Bank (unfortunately, we had never heard of this publication before).
The newspaper, named ‘Emerging Markets’, conferred Best Finance Minister of South Asia Award to Ishaq Dar and Best Country in South Asia in Infrastructure Development to Minister of Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal. While congratulating themselves on the great honour for the country, the ministers talked about the publication’s link with two international financial institutions (IFIs).
It did not take the IMF long to clarify that it had nothing to do with ‘Emerging Markets’. Newspapers also noticed that the prestigious international publication had just received advertisements from Pakistan’s state-owned institutions including the National Bank of Pakistan (NBP), State Life Insurance Corporation of Pakistan, Zarai Taraqiati Bank Limited (ZTBL), National Insurance Corporation Limited (NICL) and Pak-Arab Refinery Company (Parco).
While Pakistan was winning awards and honours, a Karachi-based journalist decided to give us a bad name by leaking a false and fabricated story linking our dear country with non-state actors. As Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan elaborated, his news story gave grist to the mill of anti-Pakistani narrative in leading Indian newspapers and televisions. I myself can testify that before this news story was published, the pro-Pakistan narrative was rife in Indian media and our narrative was selling in world capitals like sweets on Eid day.
In these happening times, the best comment on our sad situation came from the Honourable Chief Justice of Pakistan who stated that we have monarchy in the country masquerading as democracy. He told us that the reason for our problems lay in the fact that we choose wrong candidates on the election day. Unfortunately, all the right kind of people join government jobs and we are left with these princelings who happen to be far more accessible to a common man than our salaried democrats. The honourable Justice did not tell us how good the system of justice is.
Amidst the din of war between different sections of Pakistan’s power elite, a small news items flickered on Pakistan’s television channels and then disappeared. The annual report of the International Food Policy Institute showed that Pakistan stands amongst the eleven most hungry countries in the world and there are only ten countries and nations where the problem of hunger is more serious than the land of the pure.
The report places Pakistan on the 107th position in a ranking of 118 developing countries, with Pakistan performing worse than most of its South Asian neighbours in eliminating hunger. According to the report, no less than 22 percent of Pakistan’s population is undernourished and 8.1 percent children die before reaching their fifth birthday.
The report is just another addition to the pile of papers that rank Pakistan as the star of the world community. Pakistan’s maternal and new-born indicators are amongst the lowest in South Asia – lower than Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives and Nepal. Every year, 8,000 Pakistani women continue to die either from pregnancy complications or in childbirth, and one mother’s life is lost every 40 minutes. It is not hard to guess that the hungry segment of the population claims the largest space in our graveyards.
According to the report, Sri Lanka has a similar percentage of undernourished population but only one percent children die before the age of five. Forget about Germany and France, if we are able to bring our education, health, water, and sanitation facilities at par with Sir Lanka, we can save two hundred thousand children from dying each year.
But there is a problem; these children don’t die at one place and at one time. So it is not an event but a process and journalism is about reporting events, not processes. And most importantly, these are not chubby middle-class children, but emaciated, ugly offspring of hungry parents. Any good television cameraman will tell you that they don’t make for good footage. For Khadim-e-Lahore, his Bhai Jaan and Dharna Khan, there is not much mileage to be achieved from focusing their energies on these children whose parents do not have the guts to rise up.
At 22nd from the bottom, India has also been placed on the list of countries facing a serious situation of hunger. At 4.8 percent, India’s mortality rate of children under five is far better than Pakistan. However, by Sri Lankan standards 3.8 percent children can be easily saved from clutches of death and since 15.5 million children are born every year, the number of these children amounts to five hundred thousand a year – close to the casualties of a nuclear bomb.
As Anthony Burgess once stated, comedy and tragedy has the same source – absurdity. You can cry or laugh; the choice is yours.
The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional.
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