The fading of distant glimmer

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

There is a certain sense of hope that keeps driving us on, from one day to the next, from one week to the other, as we look on at images from the latest carnage, the latest act of slaughter, the latest act of violence against a woman, a non-Muslim or other citizen.

We hope that in time our country will move to a place which is less dark and into which the sun shines more freely, lighting up the shadows and breaking up the happiness.

But how will this happen? Clearly an armed battle against militants is not enough. How many can we kill, and the failure to conduct open trials visible to people, complicates matters in many ways. What we also need to do is wage a battle against mindsets, against established patterns of thinking. This of course is much harder than gunning down enemies or razing villages. In some cases at least such policies simply lead to the creation of new militants, young men determined to avenge the death of fathers or brothers. It is therefore essential that the strategy involving guns be combined with a broader set of tactics.

This is hard to achieve when there is support for militants from the top, with reports emerging of suggestions from the military establishment that the Taliban somehow be mainstreamed and brought into the system. To some degree, this will have to be achieved. The young men with guns who act as agents of the Taliban in tribal areas and other parts cannot of course be simply mowed down. Those who can be rehabilitated must be provided the opportunity to acquire skills useful in regular life so that they can integrate once more into their societies and villages.

But militants and militant leaders guilty of crime or pushed to a point where their hard-line positions makes reform impossible need to be penalised under the law – not in encounters, not necessarily in armed action but in the courts of law. These courts of law should essentially become the place where the battle against militancy is fought and argued through and put openly before people.

Amidst all the conflicting ideologies, they have a right to determine whether they seek a country where a certain pattern of thinking is imposed by force and attempts made to establish a different kind of State dominated by religion or a particular interpretation of Islamic law, or a country run under a Constitution and along the patterns envisaged by its founder when the decision was first taken to partition the subcontinent.

Practically speaking, the problem is that militants, or groups within the militant movement, have support from powerful places within the country. We all know about this, and about linkages with the military establishment and also governments during different eras. Official funding for seminaries, support for specific groups or their leaders – even when these leaders are mass murderers – and ‘talks’ with ultra hard-line clerics who wish to overthrow the current system do not open up the doors for the suggestion of reform and a true transformation of the way people think.

This thinking has become very important indeed. It applies not just to militancy but also to the manner in which thought and ideas have been moulded to fit patterns regarding women, minority groups and others who for various reasons stand somewhere outside the mainstream of what is becoming a misogynist and increasingly ugly society. Yes, we have a new bill passed by our parliament on honour killings and rape. But this does not change the fact that even educated, privileged men forming the elite of society appear to believe the rights of men are superior to those of women, regardless of the fact that women form 50 percent of the population of Pakistan.

The expressions of these views can be heard in many social settings, in classrooms, on television talk shows and at many other places. One manifestation has been the slander of Bilawal Bhutto, and the constant reference to him as someone who acts like a woman.

Sexuality, of course, is a very delicate question in Pakistan. It should also be an entirely personal one. But even if we look quite beyond this, comparing a man who cries after witnessing the aftermath of a carnage in which young men have been taken away from their families forever or talks about the situation of mothers and children, with a ‘woman’ is an example of how twisted our society has become and how it continues to warp further and further.

Suggesting someone is like a woman counts as an insult in our culture. This essentially puts down the 95 million or so citizens of Pakistan who happen to be female in terms of gender. They deserve not to be ridiculed; a man deserves not to be made a target for ribald jokes because he displays traits of sensitivity usually associated with women. Of course, we have every right to judge politics and policies as we please. But we should counter the tradition of seeing women as inferior, laughing at men who in any way appear to resemble them or do not show the machoism we have come to admire and see as the norm.

In the same way, it is unacceptable to mock people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. At a broader level, men must be allowed the freedom to develop all aspects of their character. President Barack Obama has been known to weep in public; no one seemed to see this as especially reprehensible.

There is then much to be achieved in terms of dealing with what fits in to the minds of people everywhere. This includes leaders at the government and military levels, people who influence the thinking of others including teachers, community leaders, activists and mosque clerics and also the millions whom we term ‘ordinary people’ who adhere to a specific mindset in most cases. This mindset, in some of its aspects, has been there for generations. In others, it appears to be a more recent creation, stemming from the specific chain of events that have taken place in our country and region.

We can only win against militancy if we are able to defeat this mindset. To do so, we must replace it with a truly open mechanism of thought. This can best be achieved through the curriculum, although the fact that teachers, whether male or female, themselves hold a specific pattern of thought deep within them makes this difficult.

The media also comes in – in a big way. It needs to play a part in shaping opinions in a different direction, as a way for setting the compass towards the future that we do seek. We need to be clear at all levels what future this is and what it comprises. Only when there is unanimity on this can we hope for anything resembling real change.

Mere rhetoric or the gunning down of people who have formed private militias and embarked on a mission to kill specific groups or establish their own writ in the name of a particular ideology will not achieve this. The change needs to be much wider and it can be brought about only if every institute and state plays a part in building it brick by brick and layer by layer.

Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com