There are days when I love my country the way a resigned parent loves a recidivist child. Viscerally, unconditionally, unapologetically, but without much pretense that he’s going places or is up to any good.
Today is one of those days, so depressingly frequent of late. Below the fold, stories abound of capitulations to the TLP, a force with more street power and mobilisable support than perhaps any political entity in the country. Its marauding mobs hobble the GT Road corridor, terrorise central Punjab, kill and injure scores of law-enforcement personnel who, under unwritten orders to hold all fire, amount to little more than sacrificial offerings. The state’s appeasement makes clear where its true sympathies lie and, no surprise, yet again the silent majority are on the losing end.
Then again, it’s increasingly debatable who truly is the (not so) silent majority here. The multitudes that poured out earlier for the funerals of TLP muses Qadri and Rizvi were seemingly without precedent. Their grating chants put paid to any notion of a welcoming, secular, multicultural heart within our heartland. Instead, evidence abounds that a core of our urban underbelly – young, untrained, and with limited prospects – trends towards vengeful, narrow-minded religious zealotry and destructive mob impulses.
But if only the TLP’s unchecked radicalisation were the sum of our setbacks. Instead, Rizvi’s legions are a mere jack in our teetering house of cards. For the lede of today’s headlines is about the state’s entreaties to the TTP, those vile architects of the APS massacre and so many other wounds that refuse to heal.
Now, after all those rivers of blood, we are told that there are good Taliban as well as bad Taliban. And, Lord be praised, the good Taliban conveniently outnumber the bad ones and – with all the right upfront concessions – stand ready to hold our hands and sing Kumbaya. Shame then on our ‘khooni liberal’ sensibilities for painting all of the TTP with one broad brush when it should always have been clear that there is no equivalence between the men who slit throats and the ones who merely pin down the victims.
Is this what surrender in the face of unspeakable evil feels like? Is this our very own ‘peace for our time’ moment? Do our leaders even know who Chamberlain was and what eternity remembers him for?
It was mere days ago that our prime minister was sermonising about his refusal to shake hands with the country’s duly elected opposition leader because even a mere handshake would be “tantamount to legitimising corruption”.
“Over [in England], it is unfathomable that a person guilty of corruption worth billions of rupees would go to parliament and deliver a two-hour-long speech,” thundered our moraliser-in-chief.
So can we ask what the Brits might say about negotiations with those who have terrorised these lands? Of offers of amnesty and professions of good faith, of rehabilitation and restoration? Who will break to our leaders that just as there were never any good Nazis, there are and cannot be any good butchers of children.
As our leadership channels its inner Chamberlain, one yearns for some Churchillian steel instead. Faced with relentless Nazi advance and imminent French surrender, Britain’s leader spoke with the clarity that our times so desperately need:
“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.”
Our leaders lack the gift of the gab but surely they can plagiarise? Take these words – literally word for word – and say them aloud with conviction. Recognise that our existential cancer is not corruption – at best a chronic ailment to be managed and contained – but the emboldened gallop of fanatical religious fascism.
The self-appropriated calling card of this government is moral clarity – they, or rather the Khan, knows right and wrong. Yet we find ourselves legitimising evil while demonising the demands of nationalists who seek the very state that Jinnah imagined.
We are a nation adrift, reserving kid gloves for the mob and unrestrained violence for peaceful protest. History would tell us appeasement only feeds the appetite of aggressors, but when were we ever students of the past? And so, by refusing to learn from it, we seem doomed to repeat it.
The writer, a former aide to UN
Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, tweets aliahsan001