It hasn’t been an ordinary week. And that doesn’t even begin to qualify as an understatement after the tragedy that befell families in Lahore on Sunday. But go back a few days. Although it’s hard to keep track, it seems to have begun with the T20 cricket extravaganza. Shafqat Amanat Ali, having goofed up the concluding verses of the national anthem, was said to symbolise the degeneration that had set in recent times. A couple of matches and some dismal performances later, we were disgusted. Some vented collective rage on the returning cricket team at the Karachi airport. The focus of television screens and talk show pundits oscillated between the cricket matches and the aftermath of the Qadri hanging. Lahore and Islamabad remained tense with traffic choked up in different parts of the two cities as people sympathetic to Mumtaz Qadri took to the streets. Effigies of cricketing stars were set on fire nearly at the same time. Op-ed writers battered Shahid Afridi, some going as far as to claim he represented all that was wrong
with Pakistan.
Meanwhile, a girl riding a bicycle in Lahore was injured by goons. On the other hand, Qadri’s supporters decided to march on Islamabad. The Metro Bus Service route was shortened in Lahore and completely suspended in Rawalpindi to thwart them. Supporters managed to converge on the Constitution Avenue in the capital anyway. The federal government requisitioned units of the military to keep the pot from boiling. The trend showed no signs of sputtering to a stop, though. And then it happened. This was Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park in Lahore with the Christian community celebrating Easter Sunday, and the lower-middle strata of the Muslim majority celebrating an evening out.
The more you want to celebrate, the more you want to believe things are getting better, the more sordid reminders you get that it isn’t over. And it becomes so much more difficult to sound hopeful on these pages. Surely, it can’t be that it’s time to give up. At times like these people need hope more than they need anything else. In a way, it is also patriotic to be positive, but it is also very hard. Before you can be positive, shouldn’t you be more rational, more inquisitive, more reflective? Shouldn’t the sheer scope of violence make you ask, “Where does it all come from?”
Nobody would have felt like showering petals on the returning cricket team, but we pelt them with cuss words and if there’s a chance, throw a punch at the nearest one at the arrivals’ section. We burn images of sportsmen because they underperform. Afridi may have a terrible temperament, but he becomes the epitome of all that is rotten in the land. Does this kind of behaviour not qualify as violent?
Violence isn’t just what happened at the Gulshan-e-Iqbal, though it was a most heinous instance. Violence is what we practise daily on the roads and streets of Pakistan. Flouting traffic regulations, taking pride in running red lights, honking horns — with even lesser restraint near hospitals and schools — and hurling expletives at each other all the while, we practise all forms of violence: physical, verbal and gestural. When we violate norms of decent conduct by jumping places at queues, or, as is the usual case, refuse to align in the first place, when push gets to shove as the public transport bus pulls over and women and the elderly are jostled around, when a girl riding a bicycle in Lahore ends up with injuries after being harassed by apes, with the usual ‘single-column’ headers about honour killings in the local news and you realise terror takes root in places that are already conducive to violence. Brussels and Paris were attacked from the ‘outside’. Over there, the perpetrators usually come from culturally far-off lands, or from the diaspora associated with those lands. That is not saying France doesn’t have a homegrown problem. That country has a shameful history of colonial subjugation and an even tardier one of assimilating people it ambitiously colonised. But Brussels and Paris can take some measure of comfort in exteriorising violence because Belgium and France do not practise the different forms of everyday violence that we do. We cannot exteriorise ‘them’ because ‘they’ come from within. We offer fertile soil for violence. We water it with intolerance of different kinds, not just religious.
Where do we go from here? It is routine to say we’ll prepare better, fight harder to bounce back. We might. But you bounce back when you’ve truly left the past behind, not when you’ve partially cleansed yourself. You need to occupy higher moral ground, because it is the only real proof that you are who you claim you are. Even if it sounds clichéd, only a higher moral position can claim to offer an alternative. Otherwise, it comes down to naught. Violence of all hues has to be renounced. Peace established otherwise is fragile.
The writer is a lecturer in English literature at Government College University, Lahore. He may be reached at [email protected]