For Malala
Malala Yousafzai, a front runner for the Nobel Peace Prize last year, has become the youngest claimant of the world’s most prestigious award for peace 12 months later. The teenager from Swat shares the extraordinary honour with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian child’s rights activist. Malala and Kailash have worked tirelessly, in the face of real and immediate threats, for education and children. They both may have been honoured by the Nobel Committee but, above all, they need to be honoured by us. We should all be locked in collective pride. This, sadly, is unlikely to be the case. Just like Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate the late Dr Abdus Salam, who claimed the award for physics in 1979, Malala is a controversial figure in her country. She gained prominence in 2009 as an activist for the right of girls to education through a blog written anonymously for the BBC while Swat was under Taliban control and she was just 12 years old. In 2012, she was shot in the head by the Taliban and nearly killed after which she was taken to the UK for treatment. Since then she has been cast by many as an ‘agent’ of foreign powers with claims made that it was merely the shooting that lifted her to prominence. These people have even denied that she was nearly killed by the TTP. The bullet wounds she sustained are not enough to convince the apologists of militant violence that Malala was punished for having the audacity to question why she couldn’t go to school. Yet Malala was shot – because of what she did, and it is what she did that brought her the prize.
Pakistan has refused to celebrate Dr Salam at all. Acclaimed as one of the world’s most important scientists in this century, Dr Salam was shunned in his own country because of the belief he was born into. He lies buried in an unmarked grave for fear that vandals may attack it. Malala too is unable to return to her own country since it is feared she would be an immediate target for extremists. But for the world, and for a significant number of Pakistanis including schoolgirls in her native town of Mingora, she is a hero – a symbol of a girl’s yearning to go to school even if she has to pay the ultimate price for it. There are some who feel she is bringing a bad name to Pakistan by publicising what happened to her, as if we can deny the deed so long as we don’t have to hear about it. They do not need to be taken seriously but the mindset needs to be known so we are aware of the kind of denialism we are dealing with. Anyone who has encountered Malala or followed what she has written or said would know she speaks with her own mind and her words arise from her own vision of what she would like for girls around the globe: an education and the right to receive it without threat or risk to their lives. For this purpose, Malala, still so young herself, has already travelled around the world to fight for others. Her battle has taken her to Nigeria and to other countries where the pen is pulled away from the hands of girls. How she will carry the burden the prize places on her shoulders is to be seen. But there is every reason to believe she will do so with the dignity and quietly spoken sense that has led her to the pedestal on which she stands today. Our task now should be to turn Pakistan into the kind of country Malala can safely return to one day and carry on her work without the fear that it will cost her life.
LG polls
The state has a constitutional duty to regularly hold local bodies elections, a duty it has neglected to observe for over two decades now. Last year, with the election of the PML-N government and the Supreme Court’s interest in the issue, it finally seemed as if we might have local polls. That hope was scuppered when the Election Commission of Pakistan claimed it did not have the time to print sufficient ballot papers and the process of delimitation was bogged down in political disputes. The Supreme Court relented and gave the federal government, provincial governments and the ECP more than a year to sort out all these problems. Now, with the deadline of November 15 to hold the polls nearing, it is becoming apparent that the issue of local bodies elections was ignored by all three concerned parties. The ECP still says it is not ready to hold the polls while the Sindh government says it is waiting on the provincial assembly to pass necessary legislation. The Punjab government says it can only pass the legislation if the federal government does so first. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, meanwhile, has said that it carried out the process of delimitation but did not hold local bodies elections because the Supreme Court had ordered the ECP to draw up constituencies in a non-partisan manner.
The fact is that local bodies elections are not in the interest of those ruling in the centre and provinces. For them it means a loss of money that would then go to locally-elected leaders and a corresponding loss of prestige and power. In Sindh, for example, the PPP would lose a lot of its power if the MQM wins comprehensively in Karachi. The ECP’s incompetence is another matter altogether. It has been operating without a permanent chief election commissioner ever since Fakhruddin G Ebrahim quit – and this lack of leadership is showing. Instead of continuously stalling for more time, it should have been carrying out delimitation without regard to political considerations. The way constituency boundaries are drawn can have an outsized impact on the winner of an election and so an apolitical ECP was the only body that should have been able to do this job. Instead, it has dragged its feet and is now not even in a position to print sufficient ballot papers. The Supreme Court has granted so many delays that another one should be unthinkable. At the same time, the provincial governments and ECP have dragged their feet for so long that a month may not be long enough to make the necessary arrangements. When the Supreme Court reconvenes it may have to set a date and make sure everyone abides by it.
Published in The News, Saturday, October 11, 2014