Rise and Rise Again

Rab Nawaz

It is heart­en­ing to see the way our nation has ven­er­at­ed the trag­ic yet hero­ic deaths of Chaud­hary Aslam, a senior police offi­cial from Karachi known for his daunt­ing resolve to fight ter­ror­ists, and Aitzaz Hasan, a ninth grade stu­dent from Hangu who fear­less­ly embraced death in an attempt to stop a sui­cide bomber from enter­ing his school. These two remark­able indi­vid­u­als, along with many oth­ers, have left an indeli­ble mark on our har­row­ing jour­ney to over­come our own Franken­stein­ian faults. Although we must con­tin­ue to pay homage to their spir­its, our respon­si­bil­i­ty extends far beyond that. We must ensure that their sac­ri­fices do not go in vain.
There is hard­ly any doubt about the iden­ti­ty of their killers – in fact the Tal­iban are almost shout­ing in our faces claim­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty of these heinous acts. While some of us are respond­ing by vow­ing to stand for what Chaud­hary Aslam and Aitzaz died for, oth­ers have still not awok­en from their slum­ber. Among the rul­ing par­ties, the one hold­ing pow­er in KPK is con­fused and least upright in its stance. One must ques­tion why the gov­ern­ments in KPK and the cen­ter are still so apolo­getic towards the mil­i­tants. Why they can­not even name those who have unleashed this bar­bar­i­ty against the peo­ple of Pak­istan. Why is the nation still being fooled on the hol­low pre­texts of ‘nego­ti­a­tions’ when it is all too clear that such promis­es have time and again not mate­ri­al­ized.
Chaud­hary Aslam and Aitzaz Hasan per­son­i­fy our dai­ly fight against the mon­ster that we have been breed­ing for decades: the for­mer at the lev­el of the state and the lat­ter at the soci­etal lev­el. Dozens of out­stand­ing exam­ples can be men­tioned in both these cat­e­gories. A great num­ber of valiant sol­diers and unarmed civil­ians have cho­sen to stand and face death while they could have escaped it. It is unfor­tu­nate that they died in a war that we are still not able to ful­ly accept and face. But we do hope that their spir­it will help us car­ry on this strug­gle rem­i­nis­cent of the fol­low­ing words:
Rise and Rise
again and again
like the Phoenix
from the Ash­es
until the Lambs
become Lions and
The Rule of Dark­ness
is no more.

The Web of Cen­sor­ship
It has been almost one year and five months since YouTube has been blocked in Pak­istan. In mul­ti­ple sur­veys a vast major­i­ty of inter­net users have expressed their oppo­si­tion to the ban. An even greater num­ber (82%) have been using prox­ies to access the blocked con­tent. These sta­tis­tics are clear proof of the redun­dan­cy of offi­cial maneu­vers to cen­sor the web. With­in a year, Pakistan’s sta­tus on inter­net free­dom moved from ‘part­ly free’ to ‘not free’, and now ranks among the top ten most cen­sored coun­tries in the world. Unmoved by this bur­den of shame, our IT min­is­ter has even threat­ened to ban Google. The gov­ern­ment must real­ize that access to the inter­net is a human right, and deny­ing this right in any way to over 20 mil­lion inter­net users in Pak­istan will fur­ther weak­en the frag­ile demo­c­ra­t­ic process, if not worse.