WE’VE been here before. It’s all too familiar. The attack, the deaths, the crying mothers and fathers; the candlelight vigils, emblazoned placards, the spontaneous protests. All eventually making way for despair and, ultimately, silence.
Almost a week on from the tragedy in Peshawar, the country continues to grapple with how best to channel its grief and anger into something substantive; something, anything that may prevent such heinous atrocities from taking place again.
The government, in response, has ended the moratorium on the death sentence (though the logic behind such a move remains suspect at best). The army carried out air strikes in Khyber valley as retaliation. Just how they miraculously managed to gather attack-prompting intelligence — if any — precipitates all sorts of uncomfortable questions. Imran Khan, in a mature gesture expected of a politician of his stature, called off his anti-government protests out of respect for the victims.
As of this moment, political parties and their ancillary organisations are the only ones capable of carrying out a societal rethink.
Most encouragingly, though, civil society and progressive political parties did what they could do to make themselves heard through public platforms, whether on the internet, in newsprint, or on the street outside Islamabad’s Lal Masjid. This is interesting because while the state’s attention is directed at terrorists (and even there it specialises in cherry-picking), societal response — from a few brave quarters — is on terrorism, and the larger bigoted context in which it thrives.
Protesting outside a radical, violent space like Lal Masjid requires a lot of courage. For this alone, all those who participated, and those who helped organise deserve our gratitude. Pakistan, however, is a large, heavily fractured country. Instigating a societal rethink, one that places religion and violence at its epicentre, is beyond the capacity of a few human rights champions, and progressive activists. Thus, crucially, to leave this task to Pakistan’s minuscule progressive civil society, no matter how committed and focused it may be, is akin to hoping for a miracle. And as one columnist recently put it so succinctly, ‘hope is not a strategy’.
As of this moment, political parties and their ancillary organisations are the only ones capable of carrying out this much-needed societal rethink. More than that, they — rather than the opaque and historically duplicitous military, or our small and thus weak civil society — are the only ones who should be goaded into action and held responsible for it.
For far too long, political parties in Pakistan have been accepted as mere channels of representation. They cobble together support from different segments of society, and strive to come to power. Once in government, they tactically serve out interests that would increase their chances of retaining power. And so the cycle goes on and on.
However, parties have another equally, if not more, important task: the task of articulation.
Ethnic parties mobilise voters along ethnic lines. Left-wing parties mobilise voters along the lines of economic class. Religious parties mobilise voters along questions of faith and belief. In each case, the party in question instigates citizens to construct a salient, primary identity — as a member of an ethnic group, as a working class labourer, or as a pious believer.
The APMSO and the MQM did it with the Urdu-speaking population of Karachi, socialist parties around the world have organised labourers and the rural poor, and parties like the Jamaat urge individuals to pick Islam as their moral and identity compass. By establishing and utilising their presence at the grass-roots level, by everyday conversations and engagements, and by public acts of collective reaffirmation (like rallies and corner meetings), the parties mentioned above manage to produce particular kinds of citizens — ‘the Mohajir’, ‘the worker’, and ‘the Islamist’.
What has happened in Pakistan, especially over these past few decades, is the fashioning of many in our midst as Islamic zealots and, even more dangerously, as militants. This conversion certainly hasn’t happened on its own. It has taken years of hard work diligently put in by religious-political organisations, who’ve taken full advantage of a confused state-perpetuated nationalism, and a defence policy built on attritional, outsourced warfare.
And just like it has taken us this long to plummet this far below, to this darkest of points where school-aged children are massacred merely for being schoolgoing children, it will take us ages to pull ourselves out. As clichéd as it may sound, the time to start this refashioning, for this larger rethink, has to be now.
There are those who feel more outraged by the attack in Peshawar than they’ve felt after all previous attacks. Then there would be those who — after this travesty — may feel uncomfortable today for remaining ambivalent about militancy in the past. These are the gaps, the little windows of opportunity that need to be picked out.
The PTI, for example, has shown itself to be quite adroit when it comes to gathering people on the roads and for its rallies. It can, if it wanted to, utilise its well-connected party structure to propagate anti-militancy, anti-Talibanisation, and the rather simple message of ‘do not kill other people’. The PML-N, currently in government, is even better positioned; it could speed up curriculum reforms, police hate-speech in mosques, and initiate a conversation about militancy in Punjab amongst its conservative core electorate.
Naturally, all this would only be possible if our mainstream parties felt duty bound to undertake such initiatives. Their track record so far — after nearly a decade of violence — is decidedly less stellar. It shows a preference for picking narrow, electorally relevant (and safe) positions, as opposed to taking up the transformative task required to deal with this mess.
We reached this point because nobody, except for a handful of progressive activists, thinks it’s worth the effort. The tragedy is that we will keep revisiting this point till those who matter, those with resources, finally feel compelled to act.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, December 22th, 2014