Dark 'traditions'

The defence put up in the Senate of an incident in which five women, including three teenage girls who wished to marry by choice, were buried alive in Balochistan is appalling. The older women, shot and then buried with them, were presumably mothers or relatives who had sought mercy for the girls. A senator from the province, who should surely know better, defended the barbaric act as 'tribal custom'. Still more shockingly, the acting chairman of the Senate lashed out against the woman senator from the PML-Q who had raised the issue, advising her, rather sarcastically, to go and see the situation in Balochistan herself before raising such matters in the House.

A voice or two was raised against the practice, with another Baloch senator insisting it was not a traditional practice and such events did not routinely take place in his province. But this does not take away the fact that political representatives from Balochistan made an effort to justify the incident. The event took place almost a month ago in a remote village near Jaffarabad. What is extraordinary is that the matter has not been raised before more vocally. The senator who brought it up deserves credit; she has been quite unjustly attacked by others in the Upper House. It has been reported the PPP-led government in Balochistan tried to cover up the atrocity. This too of course signals a deeply flawed pattern of thinking. Surely the government should be seeking the murderers, who first used guns to ensure their victims were injured and could not escape, and then covered them with earth muffling forever their screams of terror are punished and exposed, not protected through some dark conspiracy of silence. The fact the act was 'kept quiet' in fact means the government sympathizes with such doings.

Not just in Balochistan, but elsewhere across the country too, a distorted belief seems to exist that 'traditions' are invariably good and need to be protected. We have seen such thinking used to defend practices that include 'honour killing', vani, swara, the marriage of small children, the beheading of people on orders of illegal 'jirgas'. Other equally barbaric customs too are carried out from time to time, in many cases, despite laws which bar them. There is an urgent need for greater recognition of the fact that 'tradition' is not invariably good. All too often it has been used to oppress the most vulnerable. Women are the most frequent victims. While preserving what is good about our heritage is important, it is equally important to discard what is bad. This after all is what progress is all about. It is due to development, education, greater enlightenment, that much of the world has changed, broken with its past when the need to do so arises. This is why Chinese women, in a society as deeply traditional as our own, no longer have their feet bound at birth but can instead stride confidently into workplaces and educational institutions alongside men. The practice of tying up feet to keep women immobile, able only to shuffle feebly along in slippers in a manner that was thought to enhance their worth as docile wives and daughters, has been prevented by law, education and the active effort made over the decades to do away with evil elements of China's past while keeping intact the good. Traditions that inflict suffering and death on hapless victims in particular need to be done away with here too. There can be no excuse for living on in darkness.

It is deeply saddening that political leaders find it so arduous to understand this reality. It is due to the views we heard expressed in the Senate that we still live in a society where human beings can be buried alive while representatives of people argue this is acceptable. It is true Balochistan has suffered over the decades from a lack of development. The federal government has a lot to answer for in this regard. But it is the province's leaders who must too play a part in guiding it towards a brighter future, not shoving it backwards and making an attempt to defend practices that are quite obviously indefensible.


Source: The News.