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Pakistan: Why Malala must live

14 October 2012

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The News on Sunday

by Adnan Rehmat

When all generations older than her have failed to create a Pakistan that we can believe in and die for, she has single-handedly assumed for herself a responsibility that we absolutely cannot fail her for. And that’s what she really is: Pakistan itself. The real Pakistan, not the moribund state’s version of itself

Let’s, for once, not laze around with our understanding of what is happening in Pakistan, and shun our pet righteous pretensions. Make no mistake about it: a fundamental shift is underway. A Rubicon has been crossed with the first ideological target—shooting of a child in Pakistan — with a cold-blooded intent to kill. While who attacked is not surprising, who has been attacked is a shock to the gut.

The symbolism of what the outrageous attack on Malala Yousafzai represents cannot be overstated. Malala on deathbed is really Pakistan’s soul on a ventilator.

And why is that so? Barely half of us 180m Pakistanis are literate. Even those who are literate are generally a superstitious lot allowing themselves to be hostage to all manner of dodgy dogmas and primal ideologies. A staggering 25 million children are out of school. Barely four out of ten girls have ever been to schools. The Taliban have blown up over 2,000 schools in the last 5 years alone — that’s an astonishing average of 400 every year and more than one school atomised daily.

The state doesn’t consider this a priority, sparing money to re-build these old schools, let alone build new ones to outstrip the pace of those being destroyed. That we have dug in our pockets deeper in the same period to find money to conduct over a dozen nuclear missile tests is telling.

Children defying Taliban

Despite the dark ages the Taliban want imposed on Pakistan, neither the people in the tribal areas nor in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have stopped sending their children to school. Not boys, not girls. Despite the expected retribution, the people have calculated the risks of illiteracy as greater than the threat to the lives of their children. None of the schools were blown up with children in them.

But seeking out Malala to kill her and to force the people into a state of primal instinct of survival over the necessities of education is a harrowing new twist to the evolution (devolution?) of the Pakistani state. Start killing off children to keep them off schools. Nowhere in the whole wide world is this happening.

Even before she was attacked, Malala was a symbol of Pakistan’s unwept, unsung struggle to stay normal in a milieu that forces a state of exceptionalism on the state in its twisted abnormality. A little girl who goes to school is normal. Parents who in a climate of fear send their daughters to school are normal. It is people who shoot at girls to keep them off schools who are abnormal. The state’s inability to shake off its misplaced notions of exceptionalism (as self-styled ‘citadel of Islam,’ the ‘watchdog of the ummah’s interests’ and a ‘nuclear power’) are at the heart of the country’s problems.

Otherwise why does political Islam — in an Islamic country no less — demand that citizens exist for the state (rather than the other way round) and allow it to assume delusions of grandeur that take it away from its core purpose of people’s welfare and to make the country a member of the comity of normal nations rather than an exclusive club of cowboys?

Going missing in a missing state

After the attack on her, Malala brings into stark relief the battle for Pakistan’s very soul that each of us go through every day but which not many outside the country can make out. It’s not just a story of a girl being prevented from school but whether citizens should decide what the state should look, feel and act like. It’s what ordinary Pakistanis living in extraordinarily humiliating times and conditions think, feel and act daily. It is parents deciding if their girls should be sent to schools. It’s children worrying their father might be killed unnaturally (an interview of Malala shows her accurately understanding the danger to her life and yet being unafraid and determined and only breaking down when asked if her determination will put her father’s life as risk).

It is sisters and daughters and sons and wives fearing their loved one simply going missing in a state that’s itself gone missing.

In Pakistan, elected political leaders are killed (Bhutto, Benazir, Bugti and many others), journalists are gunned down (89 in the last 12 years, one every 30 days over the last 6 years alone), and human rights defenders are murdered. Followers of minority faiths and sects are shot, nationalists are targeted and women activists are hounded. But if a girl who only wants to go to school despite Taliban warnings is target-shot, then one is forced to think if Pakistan exists only on paper. Because while power players may have enemies, why should a middle-class girl whose father merely runs a school have enemies? After all don’t we know the enemy? Haven’t the Taliban managed to dictate nuclear Pakistan’s national security, economic and foreign policies for at least 10 years that have brought 40,000 deaths to thousands of homes across Pakistan? Why has the state not managed to wipe them out with its ‘glorious’ might? Is it because the state may actually not be around anymore?

The power of symbolism

Malala is a fictional state. Because if it were a real, normal state, the president or the prime minister would have flown in their awam-paid jets to see her immediately. Don’t they realise this is the turning point, a fundamental shift? Don’t they know that by the state’s leaders not showing up, the state did not even symbolically demonstrate it cannot tolerate the wanton killing of our children for politics and power? The state that does not exist symbolises everything about the real Pakistan that our self-centred media spectacularly fails to see or portray: she embodies the ordinary Pakistan’s refusal to submit to stereotypes. She’s a girl but she’s not cowed. She’s a child but she’s mature than most of us. She lives in a conservative region but pursues a progressive future. She chooses to live in a Taliban-infested region when like many of us she can be safely ensconced in laid-back Lahore or lolling Islamabad.

She wants to become a politician to work for people when even the optimists among us are fast losing hope in democratic institutions. But most of all, she bubbles with energy when most of us have allowed ourselves to fizzle out. She believes in the future when most of us cynics think it is merely a fairy tale.

Defeating fear

Malala is not “merely a child†like Qazi Hussain Ahmed dismissively thinks. Or a “bechari larki†like Munawar Hasan condescendingly considers. Or just “honahaar†like Nawaz Sharif makes her out to be, or even a “masoom bachi†that Pervaiz Ashraf paints her as. She is a symbol of something much bigger that not even all of these politicians put together represent. Being without security, she is that powerful symbol of resistance against a ruthless enemy that everyone trembles to name: the Taliban.

None of the above leaders used the word “Taliban†when condemning the attack on Malala despite the terrorist outfit claiming responsibility for considering schoolgirls as legitimate target for the glory of political Islam and as legitimate enemies in their twisted scheme of things. And yet Malala has probably used the word Taliban more times than the politicians have used the word Pakistan. Talk about who lives in the real world and who dwells in fantasyland.

Courage, they say, is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. That’s Malala Yousafzai for us. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. That’s again Malala for us. The brave one is not who does not feel afraid, but who conquers that fear. That’s who Malala is and that’s why Pakistanis are breaking the shackles of all types of stereotypes to salute her for it, and embracing her infectious courage to overcome their own fears. She gives voice to the silent struggle of ordinary Pakistanis who have been quieted and drugged by the state-tolerated doctrines of religious extremism, terrorism and militant fundamentalism.

A bond in blood

In a deeply divided country all this makes Malala as one of the most precious treasures we have: a symbol of unity, hope and forward movement. As a child she is automatically a symbol of tomorrow but an aware, clear-headed, determined child she is a hero for all generations old and new. When all generations older than her — including yours and mine — have failed to create a Pakistan that we can believe in and die for, Malala has single-handedly assumed for herself a responsibility that we absolutely cannot fail her for. At her age and in her fraught circumstances if Malala can live in Pakistan believing in its future, how can I pretend my own children have no future here and must leave for a West that doesn’t belong to us?

And that’s what Malala really is: Pakistan itself. The real Pakistan, not the moribund state’s version of itself. A symbol of tomorrow and of hope and progress. And don’t Taliban and their supporters and apologists know it. That’s why we Pakistanis who want our country back can feel the bullet that hit brave Malala in our heads. That’s why we must make sure she lives in peace as she deserves.

Malala is Pakistan’s hero — because she is a survivor, not a victim.That’s why Malala must live.

P.S.

The above article from The News on Sunday is reproduced here for educational and non commercial use.