THE disclosure that more than 100 children recently starved to death in Sindh’s Thar desert is a cause of collective shame for all those who inhabit this land of the pure. Shameful because this is neither the first nor will it be the last time in this country that human lives have been sacrificed at the altar of state and capital.

The staged outpouring of grief by very important persons (VIPs) of all stripes in the aftermath of the deaths proved only how cynical our ruling classes are.

Pakistani capitalism is of course a microcosm of its global parent. We now have the technology to meet the basic needs of all humanity. Yet untold numbers of people continue to perish or live in sub-human conditions because the capitalist imperative is not to meet people’s needs but to further the profit motive.

Over the course of almost seven decades the Pakistani state has proved that it is unconcerned with the so-called citizens in whose name it speaks. In a semi-arid country, planners should be able to anticipate drought-like conditions. But time and again droughts rear their ugly head and we get wind of it only after the damage has been done.

That Tharis or anyone else has to experience untold suffering is bad enough. More troubling is the fact that most of us accept that human suffering is virtually a ‘natural’ condition, that it has existed since time immemorial and that the best we can do

is engage in an act of charity here and there to placate our occasionally troubled conscience.

With real-time television, mobile technology and the internet it is no longer possible for human suffering in a faraway place to remain hidden from the public eye.

It is, however, possible to mystify the unjust and inegalitarian structures of power that reproduce suffering on a daily basis and thus make this suffering appear part of the normal order of things.

So, for instance, such episodes are conveniently depicted as ‘natural disasters’. By implication it is suggested that the Tharis just happen to live in a particularly unforgiving area and that they are victims of nature’s wrath.

In fact, the history and present of capitalism is precisely about the subjugation of nature to sustain the incessant accumulation of capital. There is nothing ‘natural’ about babies dying of hunger, regardless of whether they live in the Thar desert or the most posh locality of earthquake-prone Los Angeles.

Indeed we should remind ourselves that Tharparkar has been in the news more than usual over the past couple of years on account of its large deposits of coal that everyone thinks are the God-given solution to our energy woes.

Governments, intellectuals and the media all take notice of the desert once aware that it is home to enormous quantities of untapped coal reserves. But they feign ignorance and helplessness when babies are dying in that same desert.

Capitalism is a scandal unmatched in human history. Yet we continue to call it something other than by its real name. At times when it is not possible to deny the brutal truths of the system, they are explained away as anomalies, as when the mainstream media and intelligentsia depicted the 1997 Asian financial crisis as a product of ‘crony’ capitalism, or the 2008 global financial crisis as the doings of a few greedy chief executives.

The defenders of capitalism insist that modern society represents a major advance on the medieval and ancient eras because modernity does away with the chains of inherited rank and allows all human beings to live as equals, regardless of the conditions of their birth. For reasons known only to them, these capitalist apologists — mostly liberals — choose to ignore that class today is as insidious a signifier of social worth as anything that preceded it in the pre-modern millennia.

Having said this, liberals do regularly feel pangs of ‘middle-class guilt’. It is thus that many well-meaning, well-to-do Pakistanis have done what they can to prevent more Thari children dying from hunger through donations.

In due course, they will move on to other such causes. The truth is that guilt is not enough. It is apolitical, indulgent and selective.

Shame, on the other hand, is entirely different. That famous middle-class enemy of liberalism Karl Marx once said that shame is a revolutionary emotion. It is when we are shamed that we act decisively to counter injustice. Many more of us should be ashamed of what happens to the oppressed in this country on an almost daily basis. Only then will we able to imagine something beyond Pakistani capitalism.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.