When terrorists stormed into the Army Public School (APS) last year on December 16, 2014 and murdered 144 of Pakistan’s young children, one of them a little girl, we felt its reverberations in every aspect of our lives. The state awakened from is slumber and was forced to turn towards the menace of extremism that thrived in its recesses. The army fixed its crocked compass and waged war on the Taliban. Parents perhaps thought of the APS attack every time they would drop their children to school in the morning. Children woke up with nightmares. No amount of regurgitating its harrows can help as catharsis to the pain. The real fear, however, is that these assaults on our children catch on.
Nowhere in the world are there more attacks on school children than in the US. Researcher and avid writer Malcom Gladwell references Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter’s research on individual behaviour during riots. In this research, Granovetter talks of the threshold concept. The automatic ability of people in the madding crowd to be violent after the first psychopath makes the first move, one after the other. He talks of the referencing that goes on among even the most benign people to act out because the cultural narrative of the time defines shocking violence against the weakest and most vulnerable. Since Sandy Hook’s 2012 attack on elementary school children, there have been over 140 school shootings in the US.
If this is true then we have every reason to awaken, continue the war on the enemy, obsess over that fateful day and wake up in a sweaty nightmarish state. If this is true we must also realise that it makes all the sense to work tirelessly to stop that next attack that APS is likely to sadistically inspire. We must certainly not apply the ad hocism that Pakistan uses as a policy on the issue of our children’s safety and protection. To date, schools around Pakistan do not have the security measures that require it to make it unbreachable by possible terrorists.
Suppose for a moment that it is not only about building physical walls between our children and terrorists, then the challenge is even more expansive. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) recently released an astute music video with the theme of taking measured revenge from the enemy by educating their children. Though poetically a score, this is only partially accurate. There needs to be a concerted review of the content that our own children are being taught in schools. As a country that revised its school’s curriculum in the 1970s on the lines of religious indoctrination — schools and madrassas (seminaries) both are jihadist factories — we have done nothing to toss out the garbage of self-righteousness. This is cannon fodder for the killers of our children who are erroneously thought to be from among psychopaths but in fact are from among our own milieu. The ISPR video should have demanded a revision of our own children’s school curriculum where not just a specific brand of Muslim deserves to live.
This is even more tragic if you think of the trajectory the founder of this country thought it to have. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, whose birthday the country celebrates with much jubilation, would have revolted at the sight of this hyper theocracy with infighting and sectarianism as a norm. there is nothing much to celebrate unless we take on the plural and democratic values he won this country on.
Malcom Gladwell says invariably that the form of these “riots” or instances of violence become more and more self-referential and more ritualised. What I would like to press is that we are a cesspool of possible candidates whose threshold factors are very low. Our own schools produce the thinking that deemphasises human values and inclusion.
The country has no capacity to face another APS like blow to its diaphragm. We have not only lost investments, we have also had a considerable amount of brain drain and fleeing of expats after that attack. All this takes our country back years, restricts our influence both geopolitical and national, and also intellectually stiffens our thinkers and opinion makers. There are enough of these in the media, particularly in the Urdu press, who have taken the APS attack as an opportunity to play on the fears of Pakistan’s people, warning them of a dooms day scenario unless they become more exclusivist and inward. They play up their own brand of terror. There should be a special place in hell for them.
For now, our lost souls cry out somewhere halfway between their school and their final resting place in the heavens asking us to feed the soul of this country with peace.
The writer is a freelance writer based in Islamabad. She blogs at www.aishasarwari.wordpress.com. She can be followed on Twitter @AishaFsarwari and can be reached at [email protected]