Girls go to school in Pakistan in their hundreds of thousands. When the Taliban were evicted from Swat in 2009, girls flocked back to schools with great enthusiasm. They were fully supported by the community which showed great resilience after two-years of the bloody reign of the Taliban. Hundreds of schools were re-constructed within no time. Malala was not alone in her determination to overcome all the odds which stood against the education of the girls there and elsewhere in the areas which had fallen prey to Taliban domination not due to the public support but due to the weakness and complaisance of the state authorities.
Although on country-wide scale their proportion in schools is far below than that of boys, but in cities and especially in the middle classes they go to school as much as boys do. As they go up the ladder their proportion increases and most often they do better at school than their male counterparts. In universities and professional colleges their numbers are catching up with those of men, while in some medical colleges they are edging ahead of them. By their sheer example, they inspire other girls in all areas of the country to pursue education.
Malala has become a symbol that the society was long searching to resolve its own contradictions. On previous occasion, similar incidents have been ignored and the calls to look at the problems of Pakistan were repelled. Such was the case when a video showing the whipping of a 16 year old girl in Swat by Taliban was circulated. The apologists of the Taliban ideology salvaged the day for themselves by casting doubts on the authenticity of the video. When suicide attacks targeted the shrines of the most revered Sufis of the country like Data Darbar in Lahore and Abdullah Shah Ghazi in Karachi, the indignation was there but the disbelief was too deep to allow the anger to spill out. When the Sri Lankan cricket team was targeted in Lahore, eyes were opened but the tongues accustomed to some other vocabulary hesitated in calling the beast by its name. A society fed on a delirious rhetoric right from childhood that all that is wrong with this country is the result of the machinations of its enemies (Hindus, Jews and Christians) found it hard to come to terms with the naked reality. Confronted with the suicide attacks in crowded markets, mosques, and destruction of schools (thousands of them in the tribal areas), they were left dumb-struck but there was no one in the media, on the public forums and in the mainstream political parties to explain to them that what was happening was not emanating from the faith but was the result of its perversion, and that the destruction of the Pakistani society was not to be attributed to a reaction against American drone strikes. The target was the Pakistani society itself, the people of Pakistan in all its diversity and the social attainments like the education of the girls and the ever increasing place occupied by the women in the society. Apologists of the Pakistan ideology who dominate the media, apprehensive of the collapsing of the entire ideological edifice which props up the Pakistani state, went on damage control and through some improbable intellectual acrobatics tried to convince an ever incredulous audience that what was happening was due to a foreign conspiracy. The attack on Malala, however, while not the straw that breaks the camel’s back, was not to be brushed under the carpet so easily.
The present indignation is also, in a wider context, a protest against the inability of the rulers to check and counter the elements that are imposing themselves on the society due to the sheer ineffectiveness of the state. To be carried to its logical end, the present indignation needs to be supported by an alternate ideological and political discourse explaining the present crisis by putting into question all which has been injected into the society as the Truth: Pakistan is the country of Pure, which is encircled by enemies all around, that the Other is to be hated, that all that is dispensed by the dominant discourse in the name of Islam is the quintessence of Islam, that if the reality does not concord with our beliefs the reality is to be denied and not vice-versa.
(via jahanzebjz-deactivated20200414)
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