Daily Times

There are very few worse moments in life than the wife attempting suicide, especially with two grown children in the house, and the lord of the manor (yours truly) a heart patient. Yet while her recovery, implying the failure of her attempt, owes in no small way to the good work of the doctors at Services Hospital, Lahore; things were going to get much worse before getting any better. And that too, unfortunately, owed primarily to the senior doctor at the said hospital.

It turns out that the emergency ward for ladies allows only women attendants, and rightly so. But what is a man to do if his sister is abroad, so are his sisters in law, own mother dead and mother in law in Islamabad, a 15-year-old daughter who is in the biggest shock of her life — that is, no immediate female family members except the wife, and she is the emergency? So, when the urgency of the moment found me sitting in the emergency ward — the only man among the ladies, waiting for the doctor’s prognosis — the doctor did come but refused to check on my wife in protest.

Now, this raises at least a few critical questions. Not doubting the good doctor’s sharia compliance, but in his anger at my presence in the room, he chose not to attend to a patient who had just survived a suicide attempt. Even if my concern for my wife did in some way offend his religious sensitivities — which is absurd — didn’t his professional, not to mention moral and human, duties mandate checking on the patient first? And if he did have to do something in protest, should he not just have tended to the patient and turned me out? How does one justify ignoring a patient because a man sat among a bunch of women to see if his wife was living or dead and that somehow offended God for somebody?

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a bully doesn’t always get a walkover when confronted with an editor of a daily newspaper. And, as expected, upon inquiry the doctor bolted. And nobody on the staff would even reveal his name; just that he was a full professor and the senior doctor at Services Hospital. And, at the risk of repetition, he did not check on a potentially dying patient on apparent moral/religious grounds.

This, according to my observation after manning the newsroom for years, is symptomatic of a disease whose tentacles have spread right through not just our body politic but also our social fabric. The few that first warned then cried hoarse about this were, over the years, either ignored, sidelined, made to disappear, or even simply ‘removed’ from the spectrum.

It started with that ridiculous idea of strategic depth that supposed to make Pakistan the centre of an Islamic renaissance across the region, especially Afghanistan. First, we brainwashed those fabled mujahideen and spun the story about the greater jihad, etc. That, as we all know, triggered the madrassa frenzy, and the indoctrination spread to the mainstream. Before long, the average Joe on the street had been pushed so far to the right that the majority wore Salafist trends on their sleeves; deeming every ‘other’, whether of another Muslim sectarian strand or another religion, “wajib ul qatal”.

When the war against terrorism turned into a nearly full-blown civil war, at least in much of the northern part of the country and now spreading all over, a lot of emphases was placed on the so-called national counter-narrative that was necessary to win hearts and minds in this crucial war. Yet more than a decade into this fight, that national narrative is nowhere in sight. Even the National Action Plan (NAP), which was hammered out in the immediate aftermath of the Peshawar school massacre more than two years ago, noted the narrative as an essential component. Still, it does not feature too high on the government’s priority list.

It is this deep-rooted brainwashing, which has its roots in the political/geographical grab of the Zia presidency that now reflects in incidents like a misguided doctor that ignores patients battling for their lives on frivolous religious grounds. One could have paid him back in the same coin, looked him up more properly and given him the proper ‘newspaper treatment’. Or one could just bring his behaviour to light, hoping to trigger a more thorough corrective cycle. Sooner or later society will have to take steps to arrest this insane slight to the extreme right. Already we have become a completely different people than the tolerant society that fought for and then made this country. And that moment of necessary change will just not come till our leaders wake from their slumber and finally being doing the right things.

The writer is the Resident Editor, Daily Times Lahore, tweets @yourafiq and can be reached at yourafiq@gmail.com