First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

The dust has set­tled, coffins have been placed in their graves, screams of the nears and dears of the depart­ed souls would nat­u­ral­ly fade away amid the buzz of talk shows and gib­ber­ish of hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing media. Tell me who gives a slight­est damn to the twelve peo­ple shot dead on one fine morn­ing for appar­ent­ly doing noth­ing? Tell me how many seri­ous attempts have you wit­nessed in media to delib­er­ate upon this unwar­rant­ed inci­dent or how many words spo­ken to balm the bruised hearts of the vic­tims? The only thing you would find is the Gul­lu butt and his macho mus­tache in social media as if he has done some­thing to be extreme­ly proud of. So inured are we as a nation to make heroes that his­to­ry would find it dif­fi­cult to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the peo­ple who brought lau­rels to this coun­try and those who paint­ed a bleak pic­ture of ours. Those dar­ing his­to­ri­og­ra­phers will end up dizzy­ing the sim­ple things. See nobody talks about who was respon­si­ble and who should be account­able for a tragedy that took away the lives of a dozen peo­ple for sim­ply noth­ing. Mark my words, it will set­tle just like the great tragedies that have been cast aside in the past. What hap­pened to Jus­tice Munir Report? Stashed in the dust­bins, and what became of the Hamoodur Rah­man Com­mis­sion Report? Tore away by the gen­er­als prob­a­bly, what hap­pened to the Asghar Khan Case, nobody knows. Who killed Benazir Bhut­to? No one would ever know. What was this Mem­ogate Scan­dal? Wait a minute — what Mem­ogate? The list goes on.

And that mega­lo­ma­ni­ac Chief of Pakistan’s biggest province utters those ludi­crous words that you would only laugh at the stu­pid­i­ty: “I will resign if found guilty by the com­mis­sion” as if he is guilty of noth­ing. Or the com­mis­sion has the balls to declare him guilty or if it does, he will real­ly resign! Ah. How rel­e­vant are those Orwellian words uttered to explain dystopias like ours. “Polit­i­cal lan­guage is designed to make lies sound truth­ful and mur­der respectable, and to give an appear­ance of solid­i­ty to the appar­ent wind.”

We have painstak­ing­ly endured the shack­les of cen­sor­ship applied some­times by dic­ta­tors and some­times by civ­il gov­ern­ments to per­pet­u­ate their regimes. We called for the free­dom of thought and expres­sion and came out on the roads to protest in the face of repres­sion, we drove the gen­er­als out, we protest­ed to rein­state a judi­cia­ry which was then a hope to the com­mon mass­es of this coun­try. We par­layed for free­dom of media to extri­cate this coun­try from every­thing that has been haunt­ing it from its incep­tion. We strug­gled to lib­er­ate judi­cia­ry from the heavy hand­ed­ness of gen­er­als and politi­cians. Alas — every­thing seems to betray us now. We as a nation are using this free­dom to absolve our­selves from any sort of ethics and respon­si­bil­i­ty as if every­thing is fair under the ban­ner of “free­dom of expres­sion”. We did not know that free­dom has an irony asso­ci­at­ed with it. Under the pre­text of free­dom the judi­cia­ry of our times sur­passed all notions of con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism, and the media of our times is not lag­ging behind either.

Sure the sys­tem must con­tin­ue, but the state of affairs in the coun­try needs to be changed. Sys­tems do not pre­vail for too long in the face of grow­ing ten­sions among the pil­lars of the state and the soci­ety, and that is the dilem­ma we are fac­ing right now. Every­one and every­thing in this coun­try seems to be against each oth­er. You will see the civil­ians and mil­i­tary in the same parade, but you will nev­er find them on the same page. There is a per­pet­u­at­ed dis­cord between media and the mil­i­tary stal­warts. The polit­i­cal par­ties are at log­ger­heads with each oth­er. Ral­ly­ing and mobi­liz­ing the peo­ple has always been used to sab­o­tage gov­ern­ments and derail the sys­tem. Play­ing foul for the pow­er has been the hall­mark of our pol­i­tics and no won­der, in the course of six decades, we have been on the wrong side of his­to­ry.

Gul­lu Butt is just anoth­er crim­i­nal, but let’s not for­get that he became a scape­goat while pro­tect­ing the high-ups respon­si­ble for the inci­dent. There are dis­guised Gul­lu Butts, sit­ting at the helm of affairs and now it is the time to expose them and save the fate of this coun­try. Those who made and pro­tect­ed Gul­lu Butt are no less crim­i­nals and they must be held account­able for their deeds.