In a recent television talk, we were reminded by a fellow panellist with great conviction that one of the most obvious indicators of how uniquely resilient we are as a nation in the face of all odds including terrorism is that our malls and markets are bustling with buyers and our cafés and restaurants are full of people. Some of us used to make the same argument about Karachi during the 1990s. It was so resilient that people being killed in the hundreds or thousands every month did not take life away from that vibrant metropolis. Its schools, factories, bazaars, cafés, all functioned. Over the years, with short peaceful interludes, Karachi has become used to its share of organised crime and perpetual violence. From the looks of it our fellow panellist was absolutely right about life in Pakistan’s urban centres where neither bazaars are deserted nor restaurants ever empty. This is an argument put forward by many around us now, sometimes in all earnestness and to give people hope. What does resilience actually mean and why is it mentioned so often and considered so unique in our case? People cannot or do not stop living anywhere in the world after surviving a disaster or going through a period of suffering. This is not something unique about Peshawar or Karachi. Beirut, Sarajevo, Saigon, Berlin, Paris, Srinagar – these cities and their inhabitants were equally resilient. Some were completely destroyed in wars or genocides and people built their lives and cities from scratch. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuked by the Americans in 1945, were not converted into museums; they were rebuilt. People live there. Across Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, there are communities that had to suffer the worst forms of natural disasters and manmade catastrophes. Strength and resolve to bring life and happiness back is common across humanity just like inflicting pain and hurt on each other is common to all nations. We are a part of humanity and have great courage and resolve to fight back. However, I have started feeling uncomfortable by calling our common people resilient and then moving on – even when it is done in good faith to instil hope – rather than seeing how terrible they are made to feel by the circumstances imposed upon them and how hopeless they remain due to their living conditions. They survive, but they are not happy. To me, what we call resilience in Pakistan is the clubbing together of the helplessness of the large majority which endures its suffering and continues doing what it is supposed to be doing to make ends meet, and the insensitivity towards the plight of people and the problems faced by the state and society found in a small section of elite and the affluent middleclass. Therefore, resilience in our case is survival for most and insensitivity of some. The majority of our people are currently victims of two phenomena, one since forever and the other for some decades now. One is poverty and inequality while the other is violence and terrorism. Harping on the ability of victims to survive and, rather than doing something about ridding them of what causes this suffering, calling them resilient instead is problematic. When will we not call them resilient? When those who somehow survive against all odds commit suicide? In an estimated population of 180 million, about 70 million live below the poverty line. Another 80 million or so barely make ends meet. Those whose next meal is secure form less than twenty percent of the total population. Many among them do not even have a dependable asset base. Large parts of the peasantry live in completely uncertain conditions. The dividends from government subsidy for inputs, support price mechanisms and credit lines do not reach them the way they should. Floods wash away some physically and some lose their small earnings and assets. Some can just never come out of the debt trap. We call them resilient because they don’t kill themselves and continue to till the land and herd the cattle. In a dwindling industrial base in the country (because our economic managers simply see us as a trade corridor that can be run on octroi and not a proper country with teeming millions to feed), even those who work in industries are on contracts. Less than four percent of our labour workforce is unionised. No voice, no participation in any decision-making. The absence of basic facilities, safety and security for these men and women is just criminal. Remember the more than three hundred workers, women, men and children, burnt alive in a Karachi factory a couple of years ago? Their immediate or extended families who survived and continue to work in Karachi or elsewhere as well as other industrial workers are hugely resilient. Aren’t they? The unemployed and the gravely underemployed continue to search for work, try to get one meal, if not two or three in a day, struggle and survive. Take one example here. See the rows after rows of men with spades, sickles, shovels and paint brushes in their hands sitting across the pavements and roadsides in Pakistani cities waiting for any person to pick them up for daily wages. Their families live either in squatters within these cities or back in their villages. An odd one or two would give up on this existence, take away his/her life or turn into a petty thief. The rest will go on. They are so resilient. Due to malnutrition and lack of access to health facilities, 75 women die in complications related to childbirth every day in Pakistan. Infant mortality is alarming as well. Those malnourished mothers who survive and the children who are lucky to make it through infancy and childhood are resilient. If they have survived for so long, their generations will survive forever causing little or no guilt to our conscience. In Sindh, for instance, Thari women and children are so amazing. So many of them die every year and so many still survive. Likewise, look at the victims or survivors of terror attacks, political violence and target killing in the country. We lost more than 60,000 lives in the last ten years – mostly of civilians. What are the survivors or families of those killed or injured or maimed supposed to do? Stop buying vegetables in the market or clothes for their children? Perhaps one mother whose son died in the Peshawar school carnage four weeks back was not resilient enough. She died of a heart attack due to trauma because she had also lost the other child some time back in an accident. The rest are all very resilient. I am not commenting here on whether there is a complete change of heart and what else must be done by the powers that be to ensure that this game of madness ends. But Peshawar was not the first attack. To come to this stage of destruction, perhaps the Pakistani military establishment and ruling political forces long thought and made us believe that we are so resilient that our mothers will continue to bury their sons and daughters in the name of some abstract notions of internal and external national security and regional dominance. Calling our common people resilient must not mean absolving the individuals and institutions belonging to the elite, affluent and powerful sections of state and society of their insensitivity towards people for so long – a people who continue to suffer poverty, inequality, injustice, crime, violence and terrorism. The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad. Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com
