Daily Times

Terrorists, jihadis, militants, freedom fighters, Islamised forces, anti-western armed groups, proxy war fighters, separatists, nationalists, extremists, all are different terms we have been hearing as used by different political actors at different times to describe the political situation in order to define the dynamics of the ‘problem’ at that particular time and to determine the way to tackle it. The thinking of Pakistani society has become warped in many ways through the deliberated process of indoctrination, especially in the last few decades. The ever-changing dynamics of the social fabric, rising from intolerance and an identity crisis, has resulted in our indoctrination. The putrid version of these compound narrations of the ‘problem’ and the misapprehensions regarding what and who causes these problems are always around to multiply the adversity.

The state has already received its due share of criticism over its role for distorting history, redefining the ideology and hijacking the debate over the notion of so-called national interests, and defining the problems with a specific ‘prism’. Now, it is the turn of society, its citizens and its civil institutions to validate their role for tolerating such distorted discourses. The irony is that they are now rationalising one erroneous act with another. Demonstrating the tolerance over the role of the state against such distortions and failing to rise against this indoctrination, use of religion for personal gains and counterfeit expressions of national interests is another dilemma.

A society that justifies natural disasters with the logic that they are the wrath of divinity for our misdeeds is a demon of our own thinking. Such a society is handicapped with its own limitations for not expanding its cognition beyond what is being attempted by other forces to believe as a sheer reality. While writing this, I am totally sentient to the facts that our people have no access to basic facilities, 50 percent of the population is living below the poverty line, the overwhelming majority is illiterate and women are victims of the customary code of honour and unjustified gender roles in this patriarchal society. Nevertheless, it does not require an expertise in rocket science to understand that the same society coexisted peacefully for centuries with the same socio-economic indicators defined in the previous sentences. What has happened to it now? It has gone through the venomous phenomenon of distortion of thoughts, priorities and ideologies, ironically, in the name of national interest.

It is important to mention here that the victim of this distortion is not only the strata of society that is termed uneducated, illiterate and unaware but alarmingly its effects have been observed in the middle class, which is educated, and the elite class of society, with a few exceptions. This is the same perplexity under which the west suspects every Muslim of being a terrorist or having linkages with them. They suspect every tribal Pashtun of being a Taliban or al Qaeda operative. Our national forces, which have legitimacy over defining and securing national interests, suspect Sindhi or Baloch activists of being traitors. It is also the same confusion where almost every Muslim suspects development projects funded by the international community of promoting its own agenda to westernise society (particularly women) and so on. It is interesting to explore, however, how these misconceptions and miscommunications are prevailing in a world that claims to be a global village and believes that communication has never been better than it is today.

Hypocrisy is the main face of such societies, which do not know who they are essentially and what their priorities are. Is religion their priority only to hide their own malpractices against women, minorities and other social evils? Are they ready to name religion for all their wilful and unintended doings against humanity, be it charging someone in the name of blasphemy or blasting innocent people in the name of jihad? Nobody stands for accountability of those who have engineered or contributed to these distortions. However, symptomatically setting fire to and looting the public/state properties are common.

Indubitably, it is the state that has to own its citizens with equity, dignity and justice, and it has to demonstrate utter trust in them. The implications of not doing so will be irreversible. This is the time to say ‘no’ without ifs and buts to the legitimacy of forces that have handicapped society and have promoted hatred, confusion, hostility and wrong messages about Islam across the globe. Let us declare unanimously that we do not own ‘them’ and ‘they’ do not belong to us. We are the main victims of these forces. We must resist them for we do not believe in violence, torture and impositions at gunpoint.

Historically, it is only the citizens who can say ‘no’ to adopting such intolerant and distorted behaviour. They must understand how they are constantly victimised without even noticing this themselves. Wretchedly, such evil indoctrination processes can neither be challenged in any court of the world nor is there any law to bring the culprits of this engineered process to public prosecution. It is only us, the people of any society, who have to shoulder this responsibility to understand the venomous process under which we are being victimised and to make the faces of the culprits public for mass accountability.

We have to be determined to not to allow any forces or institutions to hijack the discourse as it has been done many times in history through different means and sources. We have to make the state realise that every citizen is ‘their’ citizen and the state is responsible for their ‘ownership’.

The author may be contacted at
shabnambalouch@yahoo.com