IT has been barely six weeks since two churches in the Youhanabad locality of Lahore were bombed, resulting in the death of almost two dozen people. For most of us who consume ‘breaking news’ like a bad habit, stories like the Youhanabad ‘incident’ are quickly relegated to the dustbin of history. For the almost 100,000 Christians living in the area, life is not so fickle.

It is bad enough that working-class Christians are regularly targeted by armed bigots while state authorities sit idly by; what is even more galling is that such episodes of organised violence are rendered invisible by the media and intelligentsia through their selective moulding of so-called public opinion.

To the extent to which Youhanabad was talked and written about in the days after the bombings, it was not the death of innocent Christian men, women and children that made the news, but the response of the enraged mob that lynched two men in the aftermath of the church attacks. Deploring the reaction of the mob is one thing, but using the lynching as a pretext to completely erase the bombings from public memory is the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty.

Class exploitation is rooted in the very veins of society.

Subsequently, hundreds of young Christian males from Youhanabad have been arrested and some may have been subjected to torture as the police have dedicated themselves to investigating the lynching. Meanwhile, we are still waiting for news about the response of the police, intelligence agencies and other state institutions to the original bombings.

Damningly, the same community of progressives that otherwise is so quick to denounce ‘terrorism’ has made no noise about the authorities’ blatant targeting of Youhanabad’s youth, and the concomitant refusal to investigate the church bombings. Could it be that we have gotten so used to getting worked up about spectacular episodes of violence that we have ceased to pay attention to the more mundane suffering of the poor and defenceless?

Youhanabad is a ghetto in which a largely non-Muslim working-class community has to survive violence, extortion and state excess on a daily basis. There are countless neighbourhoods like it in urban centres all over the country — these neighbourhoods are subject to the arbitrary abuse of power by state personnel at the best of times, and not only after ‘incidents’ such as that which took place in Youhanabad.

The situation in most working-class Muslim neighbourhoods is not a whole lot better, so the ghetto culture can hardly be considered a fringe phenomenon. Indeed, to reduce the issue of ghettoisation to state excess is to ignore that class exploitation is rooted in the very veins of society itself — state personnel are just the most prominent beneficiaries of the ghetto culture.

In other parts of the world, including the US, ghettoisation is a well-acknowledged phenomenon, studied by academics, written about by journalists, and at least superficially taken up by politicians. Most famously, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and other so-called ‘civil rights’ activists brought the long-suffering black community out of its ghettos and onto the streets against the racist social order that had persisted in the US for hundreds of years. While many gains have been made by African-Americans, it merits saying that racism and class exploitation still persists in American society, as do the ghettos that symbolise society’s divisions.

In this country we have yet to meaningfully understand ghettoisation, let alone promote an emancipatory politics that facilitates social mobility for the lowest orders of society. From time to time we hear mention of katchi abadis, usually when opportunistic dictators or politicians feel the need to secure a measure of popular legitimacy, but the political economy of such squatter settlements concerns very few people.

In any case, katchi abadis are only a subset of a very diverse range of lower-class neighbourhoods. What I want to emphasise is the virtual unanimity of many self-proclaimed progressives towards the urban poor, and particularly the ghetto culture that our exclusionary class society produces. On the one hand, we proclaim the need to fight ‘terrorism’ and bigotry in society; on the other, we treat the lower orders with disdain, paying them pittance for the labour they provide us whilst decrying their residential neighbourhoods hotbeds for criminality.

To top it all off, it is from these same neighbourhoods that lifestyle liberals find bootleggers to supply their parties in their own elite ghettos.

What happened in Youhanabad a few weeks ago was yet another episode on a growing list of shameful attacks on the weakest segments of society. The state’s response exacerbated an already ugly situation. But most deplorable of all is the selective manner in which the well-to-do ‘progressives’ take up the cause of those who truly are the wretched of the earth.

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

Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2015

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