THIS March seems to be unusually wet, perhaps the wettest of the last about two decades. Plenty of rainfall has lashed Peshawar and the rest of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, quite unannounced. True to its typical lamentable state of vegetation, the Met Office failed yet again to forecast. But earlier a friend had vociferously turned down a suggestion to hold a photo exhibition at some date in March. ‘March, come on! No way,’ she protested, ‘the Ides of March, I am too sceptical about doing anything in March and would much rather confine myself to my living room than go about exhibiting my labour of love.’
Too close on the heels of this discussion came the news of Malala Yousafzai having been nominated as one of the 259 nominees for the coveted Nobel Peace Prize. The fifteen-year-old girl from Swat recuperating from life threatening wounds in the UK inflicted by gunshots in her hometown is the youngest ever nominee chosen for the prize. All 259 nominations are being processed in the month of March for short listing.
But for this troubling thought that concomitant to this process the indictment of Pakhtun race opposed to education is also being chronicled for the posterity, such pleasing prospects would have made March a month of unheralded blessing. In the first quarter of the 21st century when NASA’s machine Rover is sending picture from Mars, the world is witnessing Pakhtuns waging a war against education.
One had always found book titles like ‘The Savage Border: The Story of the North-West Frontier’ quite unpalatable. One would take up issues with its author Jules Stewart and the rest of the writers writing in the same vein calling such attempts at tarnishing the image of the Pakhtuns as simply outlandish. It would appear that the present gory episode unfolding on our soil is an attempt at lending currency to all past and present chronicles speaking of Pakhtuns as brutes and vindicating their authors with colossal and veritable proofs of our misdoings.
Malala may or may not get the Nobel Prize. Her tender age may come in the way; the youngest Nobel laureate –a woman was said to be 32 years old. But Malala has already set a record of monumental proportions; no previous nominee appears to have been recommended by as many admirers and advocates. With such astounding number of people eulogizing her struggle, how many Pakhtuns have dared asked themselves what has brought this teenager to the world’s center stage rendering her eligible for the award of a unique prize?
In the annals of history Malala would be remembered as the young girl who challenged her people denying her right to education. Figuratively, if not literally, historians would see her at par with the Joan of Arc. Unlike the Joan of Arc who was burnt at the stake, Malala escaped her worst fate by a hair’s breadth. Malala lives to tell the tale while her people continue to bomb the places of learning, not only those of girls but also those meant for boys.
Pakhtuns at large cannot absolve themselves of the blame that comes with such shameful acts. Such bewildering silence by the Pakhtun polity over the destruction of tens of hundreds schools during the course of less than a decade makes all and sundry complicit in the heinous acts. The Pakhtun literati, the miniscule civil society, the demagogue clerics, one has not seen even a token or meek resistance like holding of a vigil for the under attack education taking place anywhere in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa unlike Punjab where fortunately even the issue of felling of trees on the Mall flares up like the jungle fire.
The news of the destruction of schools normally comes at breakfast time. It unfailingly lends the spectre of a nocturnal crime to the ghastly deeds. And the silence at times smacks of a perverted relief in some quarters. One should not forget how schools, unlike all other buildings, tumbled down like cardboard structures in the October, 2005 earthquake killing thousands of innocent children. Earthquakes of far greater magnitude in other countries never cause so much loss. Shouldn’t then the destruction of schools whether by force majeure or through over acts of subversion be a capital crime, one may ask? We can thus atone for some of our otherwise unforgiving negligence through such passive measures.
Anything even remotely connected with progress and betterment of the populace appears to be an anathema in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The indictment reads long and unsparing. The killing of the polio workers, of those hapless ladies, seems to have been consigned to some dark obscure shelves in the archives.
The old days Pakhtuns were branded as expert snipers and artful bandits by their British chroniclers. The dawn of the 21st century has dwarfed that canvas; such archaic skills now compare as teeny-weeny crimes to the refined arts of suicide bombings and merciless kidnapping. Earlier the late 20th century had seen the Pakhtuns and their patrons from afar finding the Midas touch, playing wonders with opium by turning it into heroin. Those taking exception to such blunt talking need visit Peshawar’s main bus station on the Grand Trunk Road. Peshawar seems to have washed its hands off of those young people crowding the entrance to the bus station and injecting liquid heroin in their scrawny arms and those of their comrades, but in which comfort zone are the suppliers rollicking and resting?
On this strangest of God’s lands people who attempt to sustain life are killed while those injecting death in living bodies in full public view go unnoticed. If the slow death show in front of the bus station cannot be stopped, one would expect it to be shielded from view through some contraption. The idea, then, of making the people watch the show by paying a rupee could also be explored. In the medieval England people could see one of their fattest men, suffering from some kind of a disease, by paying a shilling. We can see some of our thinnest men through paying a farthing; making the best of our adversity by laughing at what cannot be helped.
No self respecting people will allow such an abominable activity taking place at such an important place like the city’s main bus station where people from outside land and then depart. But Pakhtuns seem to care as little about that as they do about the uprooting and stealing of the barbed wiring on the motorway. The charge sheet on this account against the Pakhtuns is as long as the distance from Peshawar to Swabi before one enters Punjab. One proof of how this stretch of the motorway could prove to be another FM Radio of the mullah on the run was witnessed only recently when six polio lady workers and their guards were felled along its breached perimeters and the assassins going scot-free.
Quite comically, some outsiders could be seen jumping on the stage with an unexplained frequency reminding the Pakhtuns of how brave they have been and how they have been wronged. If truth be spoken no one has wronged the Pakhtuns as much as their own foolhardiness. What has the attacks on the schools, on the mosques, the poorly paid polio workers and the stealing of the barbed wire got to do with American intervention in Afghanistan and the drone attacks? The thievery of the barbed wire, at least, how mournful!