Dear all,
With the advent of Ramzan, new devotional music videos do make an appearance, but this year one particular video has really got me thinking.
This is a video by the man of the moment, tele-evangelist and television showman Dr Amir Liaqat, titled ‘Pak Ramzaanh’ (noon not pronounced). The lyrics of the song obviously extol the holy month and its spirit but then about halfway through we see our hero in army camouflage pants and a t-shirt, admiring himself in the mirror as he puts the finishing touches to his soldier look by donning cool black gloves.
At this point a new story begins in the video, the story of a brave soldier martyred fighting in Zarb-e Azb. The brave soldier is obviously our hero, and he bids his very young and very pretty wife farewell to go off and fight.
We see him arrive at a location with his comrades in arms. The words that then flash across the screen are Operation Zarb-e Azb, Waadi-e Teerah. Okay, we think, the soldiers have come to the tribal areas to fight the terrorists. Good. But this is when things become a little confusing in the music video because what we then see seems to be very conventional ground and bunker warfare. Not just that but when we see the enemy they don’t look anything like Hakeemullah Mehsud or Ehsanullah Ehsan or Rasheed Ghazi or any of their foot soldiers. The enemy fighters are portrayed as army soldiers, dressed in military style, using fairly conventional, army to army, ground warfare weapons. The enemy fighters portrayed are lean and dark and look suspiciously like the stereotypical picture of people from a neighbouring nation.
As an evil enemy fighter guns down the Pakistani soldiers, our hero whips out a pistol and shoots the aggressor (a bit like the famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones pulls a gun on his whip wielding opponent); a bullet from another fighter hits our hero but as he is going down he lobs a grenade at the enemy position. Triumph!
As he lies dying in the sand, our hero has a flashback to happier times: iftari with his very young, very pretty wife. As he lies dying the song ends and we move to Arabic, Quranic recitation.A shaheed has given his life, fighting the enemy in Operation Zarb-e Azb.
Somehow the song’s lyrics continue to be about Ramzan (ramzah) by equating the holy month with national identity "yeh Pak ramzah, iss kay dushman ko mita kay rakh doon, yeh mera wada hai Pak ramzah". And it’s really effective storytelling, rousing music, good photography, emotive themes.
Just one quibble though: the face of the enemy. Why does this video portray the Zarb-e Azb enemy as dark, lean soldiers who seem to be part of a conventional enemy, engaged in conventional warfare? Is this just propagandist force of habit or is it in fact a deliberate attempt to cloud the facts and rewrite the narrative?
Could this really be the case? One must ask the question because over the years there has been an evident tendency to insinuate that the enemy is alien -- Uzbek or Afghan or Indian -- rather than Pakistanis fighting the state. This is despite the fact that the terrorist attacks on GHQ, the Marriott hotel, the Manawan police training academy, the FC cadets at Shabqadar, the assasination of a former prime minister were all claimed by the TTP (Tehrik-i-TalibanPakistan). Have we developed amnesia about the months and years of bloodshed and terror unleashed upon Pakistan by a network of Pakistanis?
This Ramzan video, compelling as it is, certainly raises some questions -- mainly about the changing narrative. Has a bloody, national insurrection been turned into ‘conspiracy’ by foreigners?
This narrative is one to watch…
Best wishes,