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IN discussions centred on Pakistani society, its attitudes and issues ‘narrative’ wasn’t a word often used till of course the various extremist flames that were being stoked in different parts of the country by a variety of players exploded into a deadly, raging fire.
As hundreds of Pakistanis began to be devoured by this insanity, society seemed to respond with ambivalence and the decision-makers with callous indifference. These attitudes persisted as the flames drew nearer and nearer.
When the victims’ numbers started to spike, more or less each of us had our own personal story of horror, loss and bereavement to relate. And yet some elements tried as if to offer justifications for the patently indefensible, drowning out voices of sanity. It was then that the word ‘narrative’ started being used with greater and greater frequency.
But this use was mostly in sentences which lamented or expressed outrage at the murder and mayhem, at the loss of the battle and the need for a ‘counter’. This was as close to an admission of defeat as any that sanity, pluralism and tolerance were all so challenged that they could well be extinct.
Quite how extinct? Well almost totally. Nonetheless, every reminder delivers a quantum of unimaginable pain. That a woman was murdered after she’d organised an ‘Unsilencing Balochistan’ discussion to focus on the ‘missing’ Baloch at her PeaceNiche forum so many of us have come to recognise as T2F, was tragic enough.
That the murderers, whoever they were for we’ll never know their identity, got away scot-free after their horrendous crime was painful enough. That our land of the pure has been transformed into an endless killing field is excruciating. That the message with increasing frequency and ferocity is that silence may be the best option to ensure self-preservation is appalling.
I have no ‘evidence’ to blame anyone, least of all the mother of all intelligence agencies, its alleged surrogates or this terror group or that for Sabeen Mahmud’s death. Equally, there is no evidence to absolve it and those who dance to its tune or any terror group either for that matter.
That our land of the pure has been transformed into an endless killing field is excruciating.
What we do know is that the security establishment was unhappy enough at the decision of some functionaries/students and department of the Lahore University of Management Sciences to organise a similar discussion to intervene and stop it happening.
Admittedly, this isn’t enough grounds for an indictment. But definitely cause enough to be pursued as a line of inquiry. But who will follow it up? The police? Or the agency itself because it has been ordered to do so by the military high command?
The first hint of a ‘lead’ was so well-informed that when it came it left me shaking my head. The Karachi police official investigating the murder was reported in the media as saying he’d talked to the T2F staff and understood that Sabeen Mahmud had earned the wrath of religious extremists when she organised a rally on Valentine’s Day a while back.
This line of inquiry will now be pursued till one day soon, like Perween Rahman’s murderers, the police or the Rangers will make a dramatic announcement that they have killed the men who assassinated the free speech advocate in a ‘shootout’. Case closed.
It is ironical that those who kill in the name of religion always gleefully claim their kill, whether it’s the TTP with its innumerable atrocities, or the killing of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer or of human rights lawyer Rashid Rehman.
Those who kill the innocent with a motive not rooted in religion and, therefore, lacking ‘divine sanction’ mostly don’t own up to their atrocity. It must be conceded that this is an observation based on a large number of reported crimes but untested, unproven in a formal statistical model.
Whatever their hue, killers operate with impunity in Pakistan. The breakdown of the law and order machinery and the grandiose (read suicidal) state designs have created such monsters that one suspects many more nightmares will visit us before we get any relief, if at all.
But sometimes the loss suffered in these atrocities is overtaken by despair at the loss of the narrative. One watches in horror as, for example, social media starts to reflect a mindset that thinks nothing of justifying murder and demonising the victim.
You condemn murder and are slammed by those responding with utterly false binaries. For example, someone attacked me for not having expressed any outrage at the recent murder of 20 non-Baloch labourers in the province and only being sympathetic to a ‘Baloch separatist apologist, sympathiser’ when I expressed pain at Sabeen Mahmud’s murder, the end of a beautiful life.
All that such critics needed to do was to read what was written when the labourers were slaughtered to learn that their argument that someone would lack the integrity and only selectively condemn murder was spurious and slanderous to say the least. But then when a murdered victim is not extended any respect and dignity there is no point lamenting the slurs cast on the living dead.
Yes, the living dead as so many of us see ourselves today. Our failure to steer the narrative away from those who justify murder (regardless of in whose name) and blame and demonise the victim makes us so ineffective and ineffectual that we fit the description.
Being born an eternal optimist and having remained one despite untold ugly challenges and having been against prophets of doom and gloom, it is a sad realisation to acknowledge now that hope is slipping away and is being replaced by deep despair and despondency.
Is hoping for a miracle in the 21st century a ludicrous idea?
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, May 2nd, 2015
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