So, what has changed in Pakistan?

I am struck by the “foreign-returned syndrome”, similar to most of those who return to Pakistan after spending some time abroad. I want to find out what has changed in Pakistan in the past two years. It seems like a pointless endeavor because so much has. The suicide bombings are no more restricted to our tribal regions and are increasingly becoming part of our city life. There is a full scale war being fought in Swat with a possibility of extending to the tribal areas. And of course, Benazir is no more.

Call me a cynic or anything else but I am looking for more subtle changes that go unnoticed because they have become part of our subconscious. Driving on the canal or to my former university in DHA does not make one think that things have changed. Traffic has as usual increased in the past two years. Some of the roads seem better than before. One has to wait for longer periods at traffic signals. But life seems to be moving with this tense and superficial calm as if nothing has changed. My biggest surprise, therefore, was to see how our narrative as citizens is changing. Conversations among friends invariably end up on various incidents of bombings. Where everybody was when the FIA building was blown up. How the windows rattled under the shock wave and how for a second they thought it was another earthquake. I will admit that it is eerily strange to hear about ways to avoid driving on the Mall road and still reach one’s destination there. Another friend remarked of how her university had to be closed because thirty suicide bombers had entered Lahore.

In the midst of all this I am surprised at how easily we have adapted the language of American imperialism. Collateral damage, greater security apparatus of the state and more surveillance are all phrases that are part of our daily language. It is strange that a people who have always looked at the state and its institutions suspiciously have so quickly transformed to demand more of the same oppressive apparatus. My intention here is not to blame anyone nor am I trying to come down with a value judgement. What is gradually becoming clear to me is that our narrative is changing to that of a scared people. We are scared to go out or at least pause for a second to wonder if going to a public place is a good idea.

Yet, in all this my ‘we’ and ‘our’ is heavily classist and biased. My ‘we’ consists of middle and upper class friends who feel helpless. This feeling of helplessness is new to us. It is also a feeling of despair because I think deep down we all realize that the suicide bombers who have entered the city will remain evasive. The media informs us how the state is doing its best to nab them and we in the meanwhile wait for them to strike. It is almost like a game of hit and run; only the guy who hits doesn’t have to run afterwards. My ‘we’ is also geography specific. Lahore has never seen this type of violence and has never known this scary feeling of helplessness. It always associated it with Karachi because that was the place where violence ruled supreme. That is where scared Pakistanis lived in the 90s. That is where, at least, my secondhand stories of violence, killings and fear came from. I had often wondered how Karachites lived under fear. Now, Lahore is sadly finding its own way of dealing with it.

What goes unnoticed and unrecorded is another narrative--the narrative of the underprivileged and poor Pakistanis. I wonder if they have begun to think differently. But what has really changed on that front? Only that they seem to be getting poorer and life’s basic amenities seem ever more elusive. People continue to die because private health care is too expensive and state hospitals have neither doctors nor medicines. According to one estimate, 250,000 child deaths occur in Pakistan annually due to water borne diseases. More people commit suicide out of poverty than ever before. Pakistan is the only country in South Asia where large scale anti-polio vaccination drives have still resulted in sporadic polio cases in vaccinated children. Isn’t that violence built into our state structure and institutions? Yet, this continues to go unrecorded and unnoticed in our narrative. Suddenly, some of us are concerned about poverty because that seems to be driving people towards suicide bombings. We want to deal with poverty because it has begun to hurt us. That is a strange turn of events. Suddenly, we are realizing that children are sent to seminaries because they come from poor families. And these seminaries are our jihad factories. All of a sudden we ‘genuinely’ feel that poverty needs to be tackled. Why? Because poverty is hurting our freedoms, which even the state of Pakistan has never vowed to protect. This is so because those freedoms come to us not because of a progressive political struggle but entirely because of our property relations with the rest of society. We own more than the rest hence we can do more!

What we fail to understand is that both poverty and religious fanaticism in Pakistan are contradictions within the state that have deliberately and carefully been nurtured over the years. Religious fanaticism can feed on poverty but poverty cannot cause it. Suicide bombing is not a contract but a world view that can emerge only when it is cultivated with a conscious effort. Our state has for long actively supported that world view. And that world view has found poverty of some to be a willing partner. Are we willing to change the nature of the state that has caused all this? Do we even want to?