Note: This post was initially to be published in the Express Tribune. However, since they turned it down, I'm posting it here. It's been on Facebook for weeks now.
As I sit to write this, a storm rages around me. Both literally and metaphorically. Recent events have really shaken me up. If you think about it, it's really quite sad that it has taken for things to have gone terribly terribly bad for me to feel all that I'm feeling. Mostly confused.
If you're reading this and finding it a bit too dramatic, maybe you don't realise how bad things really are. Or maybe, this constant barrage of bad news that hammers us like machine-gun fire in these direst of times has left you numb. Either way, I don't hold it against you. But let there be no mistaking that things are absolutely dismal. We've finally started admitting to the truth:
We are a nation of savages.
We've kept it quite for years. Silenced witnesses. Buried it. Covered it up. Looked away at just the right time. But this time it's out and no amount of burying, silencing, covering, paying off and looking away will help. Once everyone's seen the truth in such a detailed and graphic a manner, it can't be unseen. Cue nationwide uproar of outrage and demands for justice. Pfft.. Justice indeed.
Really can't see what the fuss is all about. Over the years we've gotten away with burning churches, blowing up mosques, killing priests, beating up judges, burning and publicly whipping women, vandalising buses and markets, hanging leaders, killing Chinese engineers and selling votes to name a few. What's the problem now?
Maybe it's the graphic nature of not only the act but also presentation of the evidence that has hit us hard. Or maybe it's the nature of the victims. Middle-class, educated, teenagers in urban Punjab as opposed to dirt-poor, illiterate, enslaved young wife in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Maybe, our sensibilities are triggered in only select conditions. Maybe. I highly doubt that's it.
Part of our nature of looking away at the right time is that we compartmentalise incidents. We tag them and put them aside. We have excuses and justifications for all our savagery. Extremists, illiterates, landlords, brutal police, Taliban, politicians, “agencies”, Indians, Americans, Zionists. One or more of these are the reason behind our savagery. We kill 40 of our own people in Karachi in under 52 hours and we blame the power struggle in the city between the MQM and the ANP. We publicly whip a girl for alleged infidelity and chalk it down to Talibanisation. We are more interested in the latest cricket result than the fact that 115 Pakistanis were killed in 24 hours in the Mohmund Agency. It's all because of “America's war” against terrorism. We have an excuse for everything.
But this. This has really caught us with our pants down. None of the usual suspects were at play here. No illiterate mob of rural Taliban here. This was “normal” Pakistanis like you and me. We, you and I, grabbed a couple of young boys off the street, beat them to their deaths and then hung their corpses like carcass at the butcher's shop. All this while we, you and I, also stood in the mob and watched. Our affinity for sadistic voyeurism is unparalleled.
Think I'm spewing rubbish? Well I want to believe you. Honestly, I do. I want to believe that I have nothing to do with this incident. That the blood of these boys does not taint my conscience. That I cannot be held responsible for this atrocity or the killings in Karachi or the ones in FATA or the killing of the Ahmedis in Lahore or the burning of the church in Sialkot. I want to believe that I am tolerant and rational. But my inaction, and yours, bunches us together with the rest of these cockroaches, as Fasi Zaka has aptly named them.
Today, Pakistan is a country of intolerance, savagery and barbarism. Only because people like me, who may or may not be in the majority sit back, shake our heads and turn away in disgust. And do nothing. Well I've decided to do something. I will protest. To some of you this may sound very anti-climatic and ineffective a strategy, but I will raise my voice starting with this article and if you raise yours with me, our message will be twice as loud.
