On August 14, the 70th anniversary of Pakistan’s ‘independence’, two teenage lovers, 15-year-old Bakht Taj and 17-year-old Ghani Rehman, eloped their homes to get married without consent of their families. But they were soon tracked down by their relatives. Terrified of fierce retribution from the reactionary tribal community in which they were besieged, Rehman’s father, Afzal, visited Taj’s house to meet her father, Hikmat and extended a marriage proposal and offered another archaic tribal practice, Swara (offering girls of the family for marriage), to pacify Taj’s parents. Taj’s family accepted the offer.
However, a jirga of over a dozen elders and Mullahs of the Mohmand tribe residing in Karachi’s grimy shantytown, Ali Brohi Goth, gathered on August 15 to conclude the matter. The head Sartaj Khan alias ‘Shagalai’, rejected the families’ agreement and prevailed upon the Jirga for punishing the two teenagers by their families killing their own children, ‘to save their and the tribe’s honour’. Allegedly, the father and uncle of the girl drugged and tied them to a cot and repeatedly gave electric shocks until she was dead. The boy suffered the same fate a few hours later. Their bodies were buried in the dark of night. There was no mourning, no last rites and no prayers for the departed.
After the crime was revealed the bodies of the deceased were exhumed on Wednesday September 13, and a forensic analysis found that they bore signs of electrocution and torture. It has been reported that Rehman’s father, Afzal, had opposed the decision but, according to his relatives, one of the jirga members threatened to have his family in his hometown destroyed by the Taliban terrorists if they did not comply.
Zia-ul-Haq’s vicious dictatorship imposed a black reaction by propping up communal and sectarian bigotries. The democratic regimes that followed continued his policies: arraying religious stances and nationalistic politics as their voting base
This savagery of the crime of ‘honour killing’ is escalating as the social decay exacerbates with the burgeoning deprivation and misery. The state’s failure and the callousness of the ruling elites are laid bare by their oblivious attitude towards this harrowing brutality. Violence against women from the oppressed classes is shockingly rampant. These heinous killings took place not in the wilderness of rugged tribal wastelands, but Pakistan’s most industrialised and largest city, Karachi.
This phenomenon of primitiveness in a ‘modern’ city is the product of a peculiar pattern of the socioeconomic development of Pakistan’s capitalism. Above all it illustrates the failure of the state and system to absorb the massive urban migration to the metropolitan centres. Since the 1950s, a relatively extensive industrialisation and investments from western imperialist monopolies were spin-off effects of the post war boom in the advanced capitalist countries that lasted till the mid 1970’s. Karachi, to some extent Hyderabad, Lyallpur, Lahore and some other industrial hubs expanded rapidly.
However, the rapid economic growth left behind by far the development of social infrastructure for placement of the increasing population. Ever since the decline of the class struggle and the infringement in politics and society by the deep state, these mediaeval prejudices were whipped up. Religious and sectarian tendencies were perpetrated by the vested interests to divide the workers to secure their profits and exploitation. Ziaul Haq’s vicious dictatorship imposed a black reaction by propping up communal and sectarian bigotries. The democratic regimes that followed continued his policies arraying religious stances and nationalistic politics as their voting base. The masses’ traditional political parties and most trade union leaderships abandoned class struggle. With the deterioration of the economic crisis the industrial profitability depended more and more on crime and extortion. Religious, narrow nationalist, communalist and sectarian vigilante gangs manoeuvred Karachi’s economy and businesses. They also dominate politics and the media.
With the rising unemployment and decreasing incomes, lives of ordinary workers became miserable. With the unions and class struggle on decline they felt a social, cultural and economic alienation. Such conditions of social isolation forced these migrant workers to revert back into the sheaths of their narrow communities and religious sects. The wealthy in these communities dominated the ordinary people in these caste or community based neighbourhoods using inhabitants for financial and political bargaining.
This pattern of socioeconomic development in Pakistan is aptly explained by the Marxist theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ developed in particular by Leon Trotsky. A backward country like Pakistan would adopt parts of the culture of a more advanced society and culture. It could also adopt or merge with parts of a more primitive culture with sometimes positive and at times negative effects. The negative impacts are these cultural and moral degradation that condones crimes such as killing in the name of ‘honour’.
The acutely diseased condition of this cultural and socioeconomic order is evident in symptoms’ such as these harrowing murders in Karachi. No change in laws or administrative means can eradicate these social ills. Karachi shall have to rise again. The resurgent class struggle in this bastion of Pakistan’s proletariat, if victorious can uproot the real causes of these vile reactionaries that are pushing society into an abyss of barbarism.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, September 18th 2017.