A version of this article appeared in The Express Tribune on September 2, 2010
Following a traumatic event, it takes time to move from reaction to reflection. The gruesome lynching in Sialkot of brothers Hafiz Mughees, 17, and Muneed Sajjad, 15, has rightly led to an outpouring of condemnation. But it has also led to reactive and de-contextualized demonizations of the entire Pakistani nation. Perhaps this captures in some way the public mood of anger and, one hopes, shame. A befitting epitaph for the dead children – and remember that they were only children – must also include reflection on the social contradictions within which the homicides took place.
Following a traumatic event, it takes time to move from reaction to reflection. The gruesome lynching in Sialkot of brothers Hafiz Mughees, 17, and Muneed Sajjad, 15, has rightly led to an outpouring of condemnation. But it has also led to reactive and de-contextualized demonizations of the entire Pakistani nation. Perhaps this captures in some way the public mood of anger and, one hopes, shame. A befitting epitaph for the dead children – and remember that they were only children – must also include reflection on the social contradictions within which the homicides took place.
We must painfully acknowledge that these killings, even accounting for the youth of the victims, are not unique in and of themselves. Such incidents of ultra-violence have become commonplace in much of the country. Rather, the capture of the incident on video has made the entire nation a silent spectator to brutal murder, in a sense analogous to the grotesque voyeurs that thronged the killers. Reaction to it, therefore, has been visceral, far surpassing anything inspired by a myriad of similar stories frequently reported in the black-and-white press.
What allows such incidents to proliferate is the dangerously precarious position Pakistan occupies between tradition and modernity. The trappings of modernity – from the nation state to attendant economic dislocation and social fragmentation – have penetrated Pakistani society enough to cause a breakdown in the structures of traditional social authority. Previously, hierarchical mechanism of social control, such as elders, biraderi networks and tribal ties, were able to exert a form of order, albeit a highly conservative one. This is decreasingly the case, and the power of traditional community leaders is ebbing.
Unlike many others developing countries, but by no means uniquely among modernizing post-colonial societies, the Pakistani state has been thoroughly incapable of filling this social vacuum with well functioning institutions. In this it has failed in its most basic function; to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens. This is a double tragedy in a country with an overstuffed security budget. Pakistan spends so much time obsessing, and obsessively spending on, an externally oriented military security apparatus that it scarcely has the capacity to maintain law and order. Law enforcement in much of Pakistan borders on the non-existent. Moreover, the judicial system, particularly at the lower levels where the majority of citizens are likely to encounter it, is unraveling at the seams. These are the real threats to Pakistan; parasites consuming it from within, not predators stalking it on the outside.
The receding authority and legitimacy of both traditional social structures and the state were on display in Sialkot. Members of the community and functionaries of the state – the police officers who idly stood by – were equally impotent in stemming the orgy of violence. A steady brutalization of Pakistan’s social psyche has occurred in this context. The state and traditional power-brokers have been fully complicit in this process by making a virtue out of violence, and by contributing to intolerance and ethnic and sectarian fissures that spew an unceasing stream of hatred.
Thus Pakistan’s predicament is not that it is too traditional or not modern enough (or vice versa), but rather that it is lost in a twilight of inertia where it is not sufficiently either. This condition was vividly captured by Germaine Tillion on the eve of the violent decolonization of Algeria, who may well have written that Pakistanis too are “living on the frontiers of two worlds – in the middle of the ford – haunted by the past, fevered with dreams of the future. But it is with their hands empty and their bellies hollow that they are waiting between their phantoms and their fevers.”
The middle of the ford holds only a brutal confusion cannibalizing Pakistani society. It is where these two children in Sialkot and too many others like them have drowned in their own blood.
What allows such incidents to proliferate is the dangerously precarious position Pakistan occupies between tradition and modernity. The trappings of modernity – from the nation state to attendant economic dislocation and social fragmentation – have penetrated Pakistani society enough to cause a breakdown in the structures of traditional social authority. Previously, hierarchical mechanism of social control, such as elders, biraderi networks and tribal ties, were able to exert a form of order, albeit a highly conservative one. This is decreasingly the case, and the power of traditional community leaders is ebbing.
Unlike many others developing countries, but by no means uniquely among modernizing post-colonial societies, the Pakistani state has been thoroughly incapable of filling this social vacuum with well functioning institutions. In this it has failed in its most basic function; to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens. This is a double tragedy in a country with an overstuffed security budget. Pakistan spends so much time obsessing, and obsessively spending on, an externally oriented military security apparatus that it scarcely has the capacity to maintain law and order. Law enforcement in much of Pakistan borders on the non-existent. Moreover, the judicial system, particularly at the lower levels where the majority of citizens are likely to encounter it, is unraveling at the seams. These are the real threats to Pakistan; parasites consuming it from within, not predators stalking it on the outside.
The receding authority and legitimacy of both traditional social structures and the state were on display in Sialkot. Members of the community and functionaries of the state – the police officers who idly stood by – were equally impotent in stemming the orgy of violence. A steady brutalization of Pakistan’s social psyche has occurred in this context. The state and traditional power-brokers have been fully complicit in this process by making a virtue out of violence, and by contributing to intolerance and ethnic and sectarian fissures that spew an unceasing stream of hatred.
Thus Pakistan’s predicament is not that it is too traditional or not modern enough (or vice versa), but rather that it is lost in a twilight of inertia where it is not sufficiently either. This condition was vividly captured by Germaine Tillion on the eve of the violent decolonization of Algeria, who may well have written that Pakistanis too are “living on the frontiers of two worlds – in the middle of the ford – haunted by the past, fevered with dreams of the future. But it is with their hands empty and their bellies hollow that they are waiting between their phantoms and their fevers.”
The middle of the ford holds only a brutal confusion cannibalizing Pakistani society. It is where these two children in Sialkot and too many others like them have drowned in their own blood.
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