Daily Times

I keep telling myself that I have two options: one is to bury myself in a media black hole and the other to condition myself to be oblivious to the people, discussions and media around me. Thus close friends would be surprised to see my online history alternating between gardening and painting. Yet the brutal thought does not go away. Death is but a number. Service, patriotism and valour are meaningless words. They get a lot of lip service but no understanding. Thinking of ‘Bam’ who had gone to the Peshawar High Court (PHC) for some work. Having finished it, he was calling his driver to bring the car around when ‘boom’ and he was gone. Thinking of Khan Raziq, the cop whose tongue-in-cheek humour stories warmed many a cold Nathiagali night. Thinking of teenager Saad who had gone to offer Friday prayers with his father at the mosque in Parade Lane, Rawalpindi. Today, a few miles from where he died, his parents run the Saad Memorial Hospital. While his father tries to compose himself while talking about Saad, his mother does not even try.

I wonder what the families of the Frontier Corps (FC) jawans (young soldiers) think of the ‘negotiations’. You ask which batch of dead I am talking about now since there have been so many, no? Let me confine myself to the young FC jawans who had just completed their training in 2010 and were getting into public buses and vans to go home. Home, in this case, was not a return to their villages but a return to their Maker. So, to repeat my question: has anyone asked their families what their thoughts are?

I am thinking of policeman Malik Saad’s young wife and children. When Saad’s children, now young adults, graduated from prestigious universities did they agree with Munawar Hasan that their father was not a shaheed (martyr)? Was the death of Malik Saad, a police officer, and death of Peshawar Press Club’s police constable, who died while protecting the Peshawar Press Club in December 2009, meaningless? When Rahimullah Yousafzai goes to meet his fellow journalists at the Peshawar Press Club and passes through the security gate where the jawan died, does he think of him? Is it that easy to ‘negotiate’ his death? How did Munawar Hasan’s ‘shaheed dogs’, killed by US drones, equal the jawans killed at Lal Masjid?

Terrorism has been quite class blind — from a serving corps commander’s only son to political leaders, soldiers, constables, to army generals and police DIGs. No, let me correct myself to state political leaders of some parties, especially the ANP and the PPP to a larger extent, and MQM to a comparatively lesser extent. The ANP and PPP not only have had their leaders but also their families targeted. When Rustum Shah Mohmand or Rahimullah Yousafzai will meet Mian Iftikhar next, I wonder whether the latter will ask, “So how is it negotiating my son’s murder?” Knowing Mian Iftikhar, I know he is not going to say this but the psychologist in me wonders: will he think it?

Statistics are easy to work with if one is unaffected. That is why I do not blame the government. They cannot understand. It is easy to intellectualise when all the deaths in your family have been natural ones. It is easy to selectively talk about postponing military operations when you do not have to struggle to identify your loved one’s charred body.

Let us remember that the soul whose body was charred was not fighting a personal fight. He could have easily taken a desk job and whiled away time till retirement. Or he could easily have made billions in arms deals and, when caught, could have spent his time at Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital, but there are people who choose to fight the state’s fight and walk the talk for Pakistan. They choose to fight who they believe are the ‘scum of the earth’ while forgetting their genuine medical problems. They choose to lead operations while their family arranges platelets at the local hospital should they be injured, given their medical condition. When urged to leave the province like others and get other assignments, they choose to laugh and say, “Good — the rats are leaving.” They choose.

They choose to look with disgust at the ‘Ustad-i-Fidayeen’ when he peed in his shalwar (pants) given the option of being taken himself as a suicide bomber to the American Consulate in Peshawar, if he was so keen to kill the ‘infidels’.

This choice will not be understood by either government negotiators or the government itself. It comes from a lifetime of instilled values of public service and patriotism. So yes, go out and negotiate our losses and tears. We have chosen to celebrate our martyrs’ infinite lives. Not yours. Not your sarkari shaheeds with your monuments, bridges and roads that you will cross to negotiate to save and serve your interests. Why have we chosen? Well, the choice was a tough one as poet Ijaz Rahim puts it in his dialogue with a policeman: “I am a policeman, sir. My job is to risk everything for the sake of others. I am supposed to lead men into the jaws of danger. Such leadership demands both courage and character. Do you then propose that I dispense with them?” And when the poet advised him thus: “Prudence, prudence — I advised. Courage, Courage — he replied. Prudence makes sense but not in times when the sole choice is between courage and cowardice.”

I have to stop now as I cannot see through the blur of tears, tears that have to be negotiated away by committees and governments that have never cried. Whether peace means more than the absence of war for the families I do not know. I do know that there is no peace when you see service being squandered away and speeches made by lips that have never quivered at the loss of a loved one. Are negotiations enough for the otherwise composed sister who still forgets to pray for her baby shaheed brother because her mind has still not registered his death? Of course, this is not within the mandate of the committee to consider. So let us negotiate away and release the few Taliban commanders that have been arrested. The decision has been made, families; “when the sole choice is between courage and cowardice”, the state of Pakistan has chosen.

The writer is a development consultant. She tweets at @GulminaBilal and can be reached at coordinator@individualland.com