And the Search for Heroes Continues

In one of Bertolt Brecht’s most famous plays ‘Life of Galileo’, one of the char­ac­ters says, “Unhap­py is the land that breeds no hero”, to which the lead­ing char­ac­ter of Galileo can­did­ly replies, “Pity the coun­try that needs heroes”. The sig­nif­i­cance of the lat­ter lines stands true in its own right but the fact remains that until a nation reach­es this lev­el of col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, heroes do mat­ter. And in such sit­u­a­tions it is impor­tant to under­stand which heroes are lion­ized and which ones are ignored, and the respec­tive rea­sons for both.

The recent demise of Nel­son Man­dela is an inter­est­ing case in point. Pak­ista­nis, like rest of the world, right­ly mourned and com­mem­o­rat­ed the loss of this leg­endary fig­ure — although the extent to which we under­stand and fol­low the great lega­cy of ‘Madi­ba’ is anoth­er ques­tion. What is per­haps more rel­e­vant is whether we equal­ly rec­og­nize and cel­e­brate the heroes of our own soil. And there is no dearth of such heroes.

Leav­ing aside those hun­dreds of name­less and unsung heroes who sac­ri­ficed their lives and futures for the estab­lish­ment of a more peace­ful and egal­i­tar­i­an soci­ety, we also have among our midst tow­er­ing fig­ures such as Bacha Khan, Ajmal Khat­tak, G M Syed, Mir Ghaus Bux Bizen­jo, Major Ishaq and many more whose names have sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly been removed from our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. Need­less to say, the prodi­gious striv­ing and lega­cy of these lead­ers is noth­ing short of the glob­al fig­ures that we feel pride in com­mem­o­rat­ing. Isn’t it iron­ic that we dis­own our own her­itage under the garb of con­tro­ver­sy and some ambigu­ous notions of nation­al ide­ol­o­gy and then des­per­ate­ly mourn the dearth of heroes among us.

The need for a con­sen­sus on nation­al heroes has nev­er been as press­ing as it is now. In the after­math of the 18th Con­sti­tu­tion­al Amend­ment and the del­e­ga­tion of the edu­ca­tion min­istry to the provinces, the debate has already tak­en its course over the ques­tion of nation­al heroes. A few issues would be rel­e­vant to men­tion in this regard. In Khy­ber Pakhtunkhwa, the coali­tion gov­ern­ment of PTI has hint­ed at remov­ing Bacha Khan and Ghani Khan from the school cur­ricu­lum. This has led to severe crit­i­cism not only from the Awa­mi Nation­al Par­ty (ANP) but also from oth­er sec­tions of soci­ety as well as sev­er­al rights groups. On the oth­er hand, provin­cial author­i­ties in Balochis­tan have announced their deci­sion to include nation­al­ist heroes in the cur­ricu­lum, which has pre­dictably insti­gat­ed a back­lash. Such issues are like­ly to increase and inten­si­fy in the near future.

The ques­tion of nation­al heroes can­not be addressed with­out doing away with the ide­o­log­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions of our state. But more impor­tant­ly it must also not be for­got­ten that Pak­istan is a fed­er­a­tion where polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al rights of var­i­ous eth­nic nation­al­i­ties have been guar­an­teed by the social con­tract enshrined in the Con­sti­tu­tion. It is time to reassess the mono­lith­ic state-imposed nar­ra­tive and find its anti­dote by reclaim­ing the ignored heroes of our land.