Quetta bled again for the umpteenth time last week. It was the usual nightmare repeated all over again. We had seen such scenes of pain and agony before. This state of constant mourning, this helplessness, this fury and frustration is not new. It is now a part of our collective psyche.
But with every attack, our attitudes and behaviours are creating far more serious problems that will potentially have a greater impact on our future than suicide bombings and merciless killings of the innocent people. This is an effort to take stock of some of them so we could think about the depths to which we are falling as a nation, and if possible come up with a response.
Take the rising collective indifference as the first example. The nation that takes pride in fighting this long and bloody war against terrorism bravely had apparently seen so much suffering that the recent Quetta tragedy could not remain a lead story in our national media for more than 48 hours.
This happens every time. The death count for us is just another figure. The condemnations are refurbished versions of the same old press releases that are not even worth the paper they are printed on. And the visits — the swift, concerned, leave-everything-aside-and-rush-to-comfort-the-people visits — from the political and the military leadership look so much like the rehearsed, choreographed photo-ops that no one is left with an appetite for them any more.
If we translate our apathy in human terms it would mean that we were actually tuned to other stories before all of the bodies could be transported to their respective hometowns, before the stains of the blood could be wiped off the crime scene, and long before the bereaved families could come to grasp of the magnitude of the loss.
Politics, which in itself is a curse, has divided us along political, religious and strategic lines. All that we get to witness after we gather the bodies of our fallen sons is the same, old, rotten and ugly politics. And don’t make any mistake; we all take part in it. This frustration that is eating us from inside is paving the way for hatred and mistrust to take over gradually.
This attitude will haunt us long after this is over. When we would finally emerge out of this war, victorious of course, we could find ourselves so scarred, and emotionally so exhausted, that it might take a lot of time for us to act in a normal way. I am in no way suggesting that we should start mourning every such attack as a national tragedy — because it is one whether we realise it or not — but my proposition here is that without wasting anytime we must rediscover the ability in ourselves to appreciate the true value and dignity of human life.
We have lost many of our dear ones in this brutal war, and one way of honouring their memory can be to respect the lives of the rest of our countrymen.
The last, and perhaps the most dangerous of our tragedies associated with this war is the lack of collective engagement. We have left the job of fighting to the soldiers and policy making to the political leaders. And while both of them come from within us, we only want to hold them accountable and are not ready to help them in any way.
We don’t ask tough questions from the political parties we support. We accept whatever they feed us blindly. One party will be on its way to lay siege to the federal capital next week, and the other will be trying its best to stop it; the rest of us, those who are not in either camp, will be holding our breaths and hoping against hope for sanity to prevail. Meanwhile, this war will still be going on, along with all of our other serious problems.
No doubt, political movements are important as they shape the character of a country’s democracy and set the tone for its future. But they also have a cost. The cost in our case of so many popular political movements in recent past was that we could not focus on the issues that actually mattered. When the entire political class is busy either throwing out those in power, or clinging to it as if their life depends on it, then the rest of the people are left at the mercy of cruel circumstances.
We have marched with lawyers and the civil society, and we have also marched with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Pakistan Awami Tehreek, Pakistan People’s Party, Jamaat-e-Islami and other political actors at various times in the last decade without realising that the hollow political rhetoric will not solve anything. It never has.
If we have to march, let us march towards sanity. This war is not ending anytime soon. While we fight the actual battle, let us also come together to stop it from consuming all of us in this senseless hatred, frustration and agony.
The writer is a graduate of LUMS and currently serves as an MPA of Punjab. She tweets at @hinaparvezbutt