Divided we stand

When the Spanish conquistadors landed on American shores, they didn’t arrive with garlands of roses and songs of happy cheer for the Native Indians. Instead, they brought with them in generous abundance, disease and death — small pox, artillery and the Spaniard blood lust. What followed was a systematic programme of stripping the native of his basic dignity, identity and way of life. For the locals, their society came apart. Some among them clung more firmly to tradition, others were quicker to let go — profiting from their master’s good graces by rising high on the social totem pole. Today, Latin America is one of the most classist places in the world. Alexander von Humboldt, an aristocratic German scientist and traveller, in his essay on New Spain (Mexico) captured it thus: “The architecture of public and private buildings, the women’s elegant wardrobes, the high society atmosphere: all testify to an extreme social polish which is in extraordinary contrast to the nakedness, ignorance and coarseness of the population.”

Colonialism is an inherently humiliating experience for the colonised. This is not hard to understand. It is in the nature of things, big and small, to resist foreign intrusion. Take our immune system which guards us against infection like a sentinel keeping watch. Likewise, the Earth’s atmosphere burns asteroids upon contact, as though guarding its own sanctity. To be colonised, then, for anything remotely sentient, is to have something unnatural done to it. It is to have the final defence system of one’s pride and ego razed to the ground and pulverised into rubble. And what typically emerges from this detritus is something broken; a crudely reassembled, mongrelised, smudge of a person, stuck in some purgatory between pre and post, old and new. In his moral universe, the coloniser may have done nothing wrong, employing quite often the power of euphemism — the ‘civilising mission’ and the like — to rationalise his actions. In his more generous moments, he regards his colonised subject with a degree of smug endearment, observing with interest the native’s ‘simple’ ways, his bucolic naivete, and on occasion even referring fondly to him as the ‘noble savage’. And even after the coloniser has departed, his subjects, in large numbers, remain colonised, if no more in land, then most certainly in the mind.

In a society where minds are colonised this way, a rupture typically develops in its very marrow, which gradually expands into a massive hole as polar forces act in diametric opposition. This inflating nothingness at the core is where an alternate reality, a world of fiction, usually comes to life; a narrative deployed by ideologues and opportunists to manacle the minds of the gullible. Few — the haves — by privilege of modern education, remain skeptical of these narratives, the have-nots not so much; after all, there is comfort in myth and tradition, especially when calibrating it just enough to fit your needs or parting from it altogether on whim is simply not a choice.

This should all be familiar to the average Pakistani who will very likely — by roll of the cosmic dice — find himself in some such camp: the have or have-not because few countries today remain as classist as Pakistan. However, the true danger is not in how this classism translates into a grotesque variation in peoples’ lifestyles, though there is that, but by the different worldviews it engenders: progressive versus orthodox. Because in Pakistan, this divide is not so much a mild chasm with gentle gradations of opinion, rather it is the Grand Canyon of life and death matters.

Bridging this gap looks unlikely in the short-term, discourse having been reduced to private echo-chambers and deemed too ‘sensitive’ for mainstream consumption. But seventy years is an awfully long time for such sensitivity to last, especially when it’s cleaving the country in opposite halves. From issues complex — like usefulness of the Sharia Court — to ones fairly straight-forward — celebrating Valentine’s Day — nasty punchlines have replaced meaningful dialogue. Not surprising, then, that on Valentine’s Day, feathery greetings of love clashed noisily with dim incantations of ‘touba touba’. And as long as disparity in school curricula remains attached to disparity in income — private versus government schools — mindsets will remain similarly disparate.

Discourse, via awareness and education, is the only way to trim the thick foliage of moral and national confusion around matters of identity, liberty and faith. This may already be happening on blog sites and social media, but that’s not where policies are developed and consensus reached. It is those in power, or those seeking power, who should be challenged to deliberate on such issues — with the public’s input. Just take a cue from the presidential debates in the US, where candidates are grilled on almost every issue conceivable. Yes, they widely disagree, sometimes comically so, but that’s how great nations edge towards clarity — one debate at a time. It’s not disagreement that halts progress, it’s the denial of its possibility that does so. The true horror of Pakistan’s state of affairs is that the country is run by men in heist masks. No one knows what they truly believe, where their allegiances lie, and what goes on behind the scenes. Because if these men had half the character they project from their pulpits, it really wouldn’t take lone activists like Jibran Nasir to call for Abdul Aziz’s arrest, it would be the incumbents taking matters into their own hands.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 20th, 2016.