A FEW weeks ago, a television talk-show host spawned by one of Pakistan’s many news channels ventured into Karachi’s public parks with a camera crew. Her objective was simple: to expose the couples that use public spaces for private rendezvous.
While most of the pursued couples ran away, one or two were cornered and ‘captured’, suddenly thrust before the cameras and questioned.
In the ensuing outcry, many protested, vilifying the host for her intrusion into private lives, and the crude and domineering tactics of televised morality. Several angles of the incident have since been debated and dissected: the rights of the individual against viewer-hungry anchors, of the moral policing of public by the media, of privacy and publicity.
Most dimensions of the debate represent familiar divisions, a small slice of the liberal media weeping over the constrictions of what is permissible, the demise of tolerance and the other carcasses that litter the landscape of post-modern Pakistan.
Beyond the alarm and outcry lie some new, possibly hopeful, realities. Unearthing them requires travelling to a distant, bygone Pakistan — one without television crews patrolling city streets, before cellphone cameras and social networking, before jobs in faraway places, before aching, exacting inflation, before crowded city slums and even more crowded tenements.
In that Pakistan, populations were still largely rural and lived roughly arranged according to tribe and clan. If the father was a stonemason building village houses, applying plaster on homes and fitting the mosque with a new minaret, the son would likely do the same. He would not be driven out by the dwindling village population, the allure of a job in Dubai, the pressure to procure a fridge to display in the courtyard, a motorcycle to parade up and down the muddy lanes.
In that Pakistan moral calculations were public and basic. Your neighbours watched you and you watched your neighbours.Going against the dictates of the community bore a cost and everyone was afraid of being exposed by those closest to them.
A sullied reputation bore the threat of ostracism: the burden of daughters who could not be married, sons who could not rely on a sustaining network of relatives for when they needed water for their fields, money for a new tractor.
In this scheme, everyone towed the line to the extent that they could be seen; secrets were closely held and the costs of being shamed kept most, if not all, doing what they were supposed to do, expected to do, instead of wandering into the dangerous realm of what they wanted to do.
No one knows the exact date, or time or place, but somewhere along the way, that Pakistan died. It could have been the ever-growing numbers of people packed into small villages with limited opportunities, the sudden onslaught of war and natural disaster and weak governance all slammed on top of each other, the success stories of the same neighbours and relatives who once watched and checked and judged now boasting and bragging about migrant sons and their foreign bounty.
Any of these — or perhaps all of them — birthed a new Pakistan, an urban Pakistan of slums and survival where communities had to be created and the costs of transgression were, if not eliminated, decidedly different.
The couples in Karachi’s parks are the children of this new Pakistan. Their parents and grandparents, newly arrived in cities, were haunted still by the ghosts of neighbours past: the potential ignominy of ostracism, of omniscient whispering aunts, of cruel, finger-pointing cousins.
Their children know better; in the vastness of city crowds, in the hundreds of thousands, the millions that clamour daily for fistfuls of jobs, of seats in a bus, of rooms in a slum, lies an unexpected gift. If the dearth of things makes cities harsh and unforgiving, it grants at the same time anonymity, a namelessness born of being one in a million, in many millions, and in this anonymity lies freedom.
The 20-year-old that drives out of one city slum in the morning is unknown in another that evening. The shop girl who wears a burka joins a mass of a hundred thousand other apparitions flitting from street to street.
In Pakistani culture, where morality is publicly mediated and everything good is what can be seen and proven, — where the individual conscience is not seen as the site of moral decisions — the dislocation of communities represents the emergence of a moral vacuum. Devoid of both conscience and community, the urban hordes in Pakistani cities inhabit a foggy intersection lacking both the tools to make individual moral decisions or the communal environments that forcibly demanded moral conformity.
In this rudderless space, the righteous overtures of vigilante television anchors, of belligerent, hate-filled mullahs, begin to stand in for what is absent: the realisation that not all that is possible without discovery or consequence is right, and not all that is impossible consequently wrong.
In the hands of a new urban generation, used to the freedom and anonymity of being just one in a million, the issue of morality and public space stands at a crossroads. Either the mantle of watching, checking and ostracising — once accomplished by the neighbour or the cousin — can be handed off to the mullah, the television anchor or the state, artificially rendering the city as constricted as the village, resurrecting the fear of being caught as the only reason to behave.
Or, perhaps, used to the freedom of choosing, of carrying the weighty burdens of survival on their own shoulders, this breed of young urban Pakistanis will mark a different path: one where right and wrong is not a question of public shame but an issue of private conscience.
Either way, what we now know about women in burkas and television talk-show hosts is that piety, public or private, is not a simple sum of the clothes we wear or the fingers we point.
The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.