When Words Can Kill

“There is a call­ing that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and secu­ri­ty. It is the call of con­science.” – Las­an­tha Wick­re­matunge

The mur­der­ous attack on renowned jour­nal­ist and author Raza Rumi has come as anoth­er shock­ing reminder of the state of our coun­try; we seem to have become a soci­ety where mass mur­der­ers roam free while using one’s voice to speak out is enough to get you killed. As each inci­dent shocks us anew with no prac­ti­cal change to the sit­u­a­tion at hand, it is per­haps time to brace our­selves for even worse times ahead.

Let there be no doubt that Raza Rumi and his ilk are being sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly attacked for speak­ing truth to pow­er, while pow­er in this coun­try is con­tin­u­ous­ly being ced­ed to the mil­i­tants.

These assailants are most com­mon­ly referred to in the main­stream media and pub­lic dis­course as ‘unknown per­sons’ – a sign of creep­ing fear, ide­o­log­i­cal obscu­ran­tism or both. How­ev­er every con­sci­en­tious cit­i­zen of this coun­try knows who these ‘unknown per­sons’ are and what they want. While the gov­ern­ment implores the mil­i­tants to dis­con­tin­ue their vio­lent and bar­bar­ic activ­i­ties – whether such des­per­ate efforts suc­ceed or not is anoth­er debate – it must not for­get its fore­most respon­si­bil­i­ty is to pro­tect its cit­i­zens.

An attack on a jour­nal­ist must be tak­en with due seri­ous­ness because jour­nal­ists act as the eyes and ears of the pub­lic, and pub­lic opin­ion is the con­sti­tut­ing matrix with­in which a sys­tem of gov­ern­ment func­tions. In our cul­ture of offi­cial secre­cy and lack of account­abil­i­ty, jour­nal­ists play a cru­cial role of enabling the mass­es to make informed polit­i­cal deci­sions and hold the pow­er­ful respon­si­ble.

It should be quite appar­ent that the attacks on the media are not just a ran­dom reac­tion by the mil­i­tants. In fact they are the result of the strate­gic use of ruth­less yet con­trolled vio­lence to achieve cer­tain ide­o­log­i­cal goals. Silenc­ing dis­si­dents is thus an imme­di­ate and pri­ma­ry objec­tive. It is plain to see how mil­i­tants are pri­or­i­tiz­ing one tar­get after the oth­er, the media being a rel­a­tive­ly recent addi­tion to this.

Raza Rumi and many oth­ers were attacked for their words – the super­flu­ous dis­tinc­tion of Urdu ver­sus Eng­lish media is also los­ing its mean­ing now. Some say they can­not kill all of us. But do they have to? They know how many to kill to silence the rest – after all it is not all that dif­fi­cult since we are already the ‘too silent major­i­ty’.

But it is impor­tant to remem­ber that in a sit­u­a­tion where words can kill the answer can­not be more silence, as only more words can save us. Because if silence does pre­vail, some may live for a while but only at the expense of many more who are at con­stant risk of per­ish­ing soon.