Demons in the shadows

When you run your eyes across the front page of a newspaper – and many ‘readers’ just do that – and click through the talk shows in the evening, you are likely to form an opinion about the state of the nation. You also get the sense of what the big news is on a given day.

If you get to talk to friends and acquaintances about politics and about things that make you angry, the references remain the same. And yes, something like the dramatic arrest of the PML-N’s defiant leader Rana Sanaullah on Monday by the Anti-Narcotics Force is bound to be a media blockbuster that will naturally grab popular attention.

But isn’t there a lot in the life that our ordinary people live that does not make it to the front pages or the talk shows? If there are some glimpses of reality on social media, we also know that a noxious fog of deception floats in this territory. So many mercenaries have been enlisted in a war in which “ignorant armies clash by night”.

We were distracted for all these weeks by the Cricket World Cup. It was, in many ways, a useful involvement, inspiring a sense of togetherness across political divides. After the initial debacle, we did stage a comeback and a perceived parallel with 1992 kept our dreams alive until victories and losses in matches we did not play blocked our way to the semis.

Finally, the miracle that was even envisaged by some as a possibility did not take place on Friday and our players are now headed home. There is bound to be a lot of recriminations and post-mortems and many of them would want to settle their scores. However, after the excitement that is still pending, it is expected to be business as usual.

But is this business as usual in our national affairs? Big changes are surely taking place in the aftermath of the budget and the opposition’s resolve to launch a movement against the government. As expected, the front pages and the talk shows are all on the boil.

What does not seem to change is the present government’s passion against its political adversaries. Holding the fort, mainly, is that erstwhile PPP warrior Firdaus Ashiq Awan. The inspiration, of course, comes from ‘Kaptaan’ himself. That this tsunami of invective is a political strategy is certified by the return to the Punjab cabinet of Fayyazul Hassan Chauhan on Friday, the former information and culture minister who had to leave after his derogatory statements against minorities.

The idea, obviously, is to create a smokescreen to hide some other issues and to keep political acrimony at the centre of public discourse. The point I am making is that there is a lot beyond politics that we can only ignore at our peril. A momentous ‘tabdeeli’ is taking place in our society, and it is not being adequately monitored. It does not make the front pages or the talk shows in which the regular panellists parrot their lines.

Some weeks ago, our very perceptive social critic and writer Mohammad Hanif wrote this piece in the British daily ‘The Guardian’. Its heading was: ‘Pakistan: where the daily slaughter of women barely makes the news’. It is easy to guess what he was talking about. This phenomenon of honour killings is generally treated in the media as casually as a fatal traffic accident, though a fatal traffic accident also deserves proper attention for its human dimensions.

Hanif had noted how stories of murdered women are recorded “with grim regularity in one and half inches of a single newspaper column”. He had actually cited Urdu newspapers though the English papers also do not possess any exceptional news sense.

A friend, with intimate knowledge of such norms, argues that an honour killing is more serious a crime that is detrimental to our social advancement than, yes, suicide bombing. His reasoning is that a suicide bomber acts against those he sees as enemies and is assured of his passage to heaven. An honour killing is committed by the victim’s own brothers, fathers and close male relatives. There is supposed to be a bond of love in such relationships.

Since, for journalistic reasons, I need to select the peg for my column from the current week I have mentioned honour killing with a purpose. A crime was committed in Multan last Sunday night that was reportedly motivated by a husband’s suspicion about the character of his wife. But it was not routine honour killing. Nine lives were lost in this encounter.

The details are hazy because of how this incident was reported. Apparently, this person killed his wife, mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law and their three children with a gun. He locked the bodies in a house and set it on fire. There must have been other persons injured by the firing. In any case, the final count of the dead was nine. The man, we were told, was employed in Saudi Arabia and had just returned to Pakistan. There are no confirmed details of this exceptionally gory incident.

So, what happened after this story was reported by the electronic media and in the newspapers? In the first place, it was not a big headline on any front page. It did not trigger any tremors in our collective consciousness. We can assume that it was not a point of discussion in the federal cabinet or at any other table of authority.

Perhaps Hanif can use it as the plot for his next novel, somewhat in the line of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’, which was classified as a non-fiction novel and detailed the murder of four members of a farming community in Kansas in 1959. It took Capote some years to write it and it was a life-changing experience for him.

Our problem is that our lives and the thoughts of our rulers are not changed by whatever is happening in the lower depths of our society. But I see the Multan incident as just one example of how the tide of criminal violence is rising in Pakistan. There are other examples of heightened brutality in crimes like honour killing.

On Thursday, Federal Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari said in a session about child protection in Islamabad said that Pakistan, unfortunately, was number one in child pornography. She urged a dialogue about the menace of child abuse. And what after that?

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com