blue moon: For Malala Yousafzai and Beyond

As everybody on the planet who can read and understand one human language or another would know by now, a Taliban gunman shot 14 year old Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai on 9th October 2012 on her way home from school in Swat Valley. Her crime: wanting to go to school and talking about the difficulties she experienced under the Taliban who had already banned girls from going to school which had seen a drastic drop in school attendance of girls in areas under its influence. In other words, she was shot for her thirst for knowledge and being truthful about her life. In this sense, as many of us also aspire for the same things as Malala, we also deserve similarly gruesome punishment. If this is to be considered mainstream thinking in any society, that moment would clearly mark the perversion of the human spirit and common sense.

Coming from a war zone myself, having seen numerous deaths of school friends, family and childhood neighbors in the prime of their lives, I thought that brutalization of my own backyard had also taken its emotional toll on me; I assumed in the often clinical sense that I sometimes see the world, heavily critiqued by friends, that senseless death and destruction will not have the same affect it had on me long time ago, which I used to call the ‘dark ages.’ But the attempted killing of Malala Yousafzai, if nothing else has shown me that ‘dark ages’ facilitated by a monumental lack of wisdom and vision around us, is a not something of the past. It is of the present and perhaps the future of the land mass we call South Asia. Malala’s corner of this landmass is simply one of the many places where such cruelty and unpleasantness takes place on a routine basis and justice seem to have fled into exile, perhaps in another universe. Personally, the tragedy that befell her and the consequent thinking in my own mind indicated to me with a great degree of relief that my own experiences had not completely removed my capacity to feel anguish over other’s pain. It appears at least fragments of that former capacity still exist.

Writing an essay to the Express Tribune on 17^th October 2012, on what the shooting of Malala Yousafzai means, Ayesha Sidiqa concluded her essay with the following words: “So, all I can tell Malala is to get well soon, piece her life together and get on with life somewhere else, as her homeland has no capacity to protect her and many like her” (http://tribune.com.pk/story/452920/get-well-malala-and-find-another-home-because-we-cant-protect-you/). This is not mere rhetoric, but a statement of fact that touches many people; it is very much part of the reality in many parts of Pakistan where continuity of life and the eternal shadow of sudden death are no longer within one’s own control. Such things are decided by people who think it is bad for girls to go to school and it is even worse to be truthful about one’s own life experiences; and Malala and many others have paid the price for trying to defy this logic. Responding to Siddiqa’s concluding comments in exasperation, someone called Sara made the following point: “You could have easily ended it with Malala, get well soon, we all promise to help Pakistan and make it a better place, where all citizens can lead good and safe life.” True, she could have said it, and yet, nothing would have happened as the unraveling of Pakistan over the last few years have clearly indicated. But this response is not unusual. The inability to see what is unpleasant and mixing it up with notions of patriotism in the context of which losing sight of larger and more poignant issues is precisely what happens to many people in these circumstances. It has also happened in Sri Lanka and continues to happen there; it happens in different degrees in many other parts of militarized ‘South Asia’ where freedom of expression is fast becoming a scarce resource.

It is precisely due to this sense of institutionalized uncertainty, anxiety and fear prevalent in Pakistan that some friends from Islamabad recently asked me if it would make sense for them to migrate to Sri Lanka, from one war zone to a former war zone where new dictatorial politics of oligarchic and familial sensibilities are steadily being implanted. But institutionalized politics of violence that have been allowed to grow simply cannot be wished away, be that in Pakistan or anywhere else.

It is in such a context that defy logic, that defy rationality, that defy common sense and far away from the travails of Swat Valley and the tragedy of Pakistani nationhood that students of Ambedkar University Delhi and some of their teachers organized a solidarity march for Malala Yousafzai on October 18^th 2012 (https://www.facebook.com/events/408942092505482/410038035729221/?notif_t=plan_mall_activity). It did cross my mind that this event was not organized by the students of more established universities of Delhi which range from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, Indian Institute of Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia and so on. But no matter; the world has many other things to do too, and it must go on. In any event, this was not a vociferous march through busy streets, shouting slogans and disrupting traffic. It was almost a silent prayer and a moment of hope in motion. About 100 students carrying hand-written placards simply walked through the AUD campus, and then around the university perimeter along some of the streets in the vicinity of Kashmiri Gate with a minimum disruption of traffic. Most motorists and rickshaw pullers watched the precession in patience; they browsed through the placards and asked a few questions. Some others blared their horns and yet again indicated Delhi’s characteristic lack of patience and warmth. Besides, perhaps they needed to get home for better things.

Contradictions in the overall scheme of reality within which this event must be located could not escape even the untrained gaze of a layman. It seemed to me that more car and motorcycle horns blared inside the AUD campus trying to get the students assembled for the march in the narrow main street out of the way; it appeared that some individuals in the compound were in a mighty hurry to get out, only to be halted by the nasty traffic just outside the gate. But then, that was life and the march was perhaps not. Young women and men looked on with amusement as well as with boredom while the marchers walked through campus in silence; others played basket ball and cricket; yet others made snooty comments; and others touched up their makeup; others drank coffee and threw the paper cups on the ground adding to Delhi’s expanding collection of garbage.

Nevertheless, all this also meant that life went on, and must necessarily go on beyond what happened to Malala Yousafzai, beyond the unhappiness of Pakistan and beyond the multiple tragedies routinely unfolding in our region. But then, if human tragedies do not disturb our collective conscience at some point, if others’ pain does not touch our hearts at some level, if we are structurally blind to the calamities of our time, if we allow the convenience of amnesia to devour our memories of wrongs of the recent past, without our knowing, we will lose our affinity with ourselves, with what used to be called the human spirit.

In this scenario, my gratitude goes out to the students and colleagues at AUD who did a simple thing, to contemplate on larger issues, taking Malala Yousafzai’s misfortune as a point of departure, but providing space to think beyond her personal tragedy. I thank them for discomforting my conscience and perhaps that of a few others.