Fields of Shame

JULY 2002 - Public apathy – and that means you and me, has reached an all-time high in Pakistan. There is nothing that shocks us and nothing that moves us. Our skins are so thick now it is amazing we are still categorized under humans. We should be declared some mutant species that is a freak of nature and therefore an object of ridicule and nothing else. We are only good at talking and talking and talking, almost always in the future tense and almost always without substance or sincerity. The message this week from the interior of Punjab is clear. Don’t be poor and don’t be a woman – if you are both, you are finished.

In our long and painful history of betrayals we have allowed everyone to play havoc with our lives and whatever little values we have been able to save over the disastrous years that have completely eroded all moral values from our lives. Instead, we have degenerated into an awful collection of hypocrites, sycophants and cheats. As we have plummeted into the depths, our voices have inversely risen higher and higher, full of sanctimonious and largely hollow cliché-ridden slogans that we raise without believing one single syllable let alone acting on them. And yet hear a Pakistani speak and you would think he was describing paradise – all the right words, all the pious intonations and all the God fearing posturing and all of this meaning absolutely nothing. From the highest in the land to the lowest and all the rest of the garbage in between, it is the same – talk, talk, talk about how good and how great we are and what a wonderful legacy we have and how cultured and civilized we are and how we have a value system that the entire world from here to Timbuktu, envies and dreams about. Few countries can practice such a lie and still look into the mirror without dying of shame.

This week, the nation is in a kind of shock induced into their stupor-ridden brains by the events of June 22nd in a remote and far flung village in Muzaffargarh district, where a 18 year old girl was gang raped on the holy orders of a judicious panchayat comprising the area’s leading intellectual and religious lights. A drooling and sanctimonious crowd of about a thousand, among whom there was not a single human specimen, witnessed the event. To call them dogs would be highly insulting to the dogs since they are always in possession of fine qualities unlike their human counterparts. That this punishment was meted out to reclaim the honour of the higher caste tribe – are they Muzaffargarh’s Brahmins? – who alleged that an 11 year old from a lower tribe – the Shudars I suppose, had slept with one of their women, a 40 year old lady, who obviously had more to do with luring the 11 year old than the lad seducing her in broad daylight. The boy’s sister was brought to a public place to apologise for her brother’s cardinal sin and was subsequently raped – four men from the superior tribe, which included a jurist of the panchayat, had already sodomised her brother. Allah be praised. The sodomised boy was then thrown to the police who given the area they were operating in and their legendary kindness to prisoners and other assorted victims of our warped social bestiality, must have had a go as well – certainly he was beaten good and proper and the parents and family were asked to pay a hefty sum of Rs 11,000 to get him back. Hs sister, after they were done with her, was forced to walk home, naked and in shame as the crowd, I am sure, cheered her on. So much for that and I hope you are not reading this and having breakfast at the same time.

Since we don’t like to face the truth and certainly don’t like to spread it, the story broke through a foreign channel, which found it preposterous and kept verifying it for days till they were convinced it was the truth. Since then, there has been a storm of sorts though not the kind I would like to see. Of course as is appropriate when such home truths smash into your face, everyone is shocked and the higher placed you are in Pakistan’s national garbage heap, the deeper is your public shock. So, all the VIPs are now barking orders and ordering enquiries. The Governor, the poor dear, is shocked – but if he is shell shocked, we do not know. The Chief Secretary fresh from his oaths has not said if he too is shocked. Maybe he is shocked and grieved. The Supreme Court free for a moment from making Pervez Sahib President for the next 45,000 years, has summoned various police officials and even asked his eminence, the Advocate General – I don’t know which general it is, to appear before it – to disappear later I suppose. The Chief Justice has said that this is a shocking incident in the 21st century, which is all very well except that he has the centuries mixed up. However, I hope he is recovering from the shock.

The organizations are clamouring for blood. The HRCP, WAF, SDPI, NGOs, Aurat Foundation, Joint Action Committee of Civic Rights, IWWA and many more are asking for an end to this ridiculous parallel judicial system though surely calling it judicial would be embarrassing even to Mr. Sharifuddin Pirzada, who at the age of 375 is still jiggling constitutions with the same dexterity as magicians with tennis balls. There is considerable noise this week, two weeks and more after the grisly events, but this is such a familiar and now, hackneyed plot. It all sounds the same – the same noises, the same platitudes and the same silence in a few days. There is no justice in Pakistan and for the poor there is also no hope ever. There are hundreds of horror stories that remain locked in the collective memory of thousands of people – now and then something terrible like the Meerwala case breaks through and drawing rooms in Pakistan draw audible gasps. Then life resumes its pattern and the VIPs get busy riding police-escorted limos to deliver more lies and sell more hopes to the downtrodden and deprived of this unlucky country. Meerwala will soon be history, consigned to the dustbin of national shame till another woman will be raped, another lad sodomised, another innocent tortured, another defenceless citizen murdered and another life traumatized, with the chorus of do-gooders shouting that justice will be done and the culprits will be brought to book. The joke is, there is no book. There never was.

Till Thursday, there were no arrests. The good law minister whose name is more remembered for amorous exploits of our folk tales, was good enough to go to Meerwala and declared that the police were innocent since they didn’t know a thing. This is of course wonderful and Mr. Ranja needs to be given an award. Therefore, all that has happened is that the Jatoi police station lambs are now cooling their paws in another station and are in no trouble at all. The rapists, the field full of spectators, and the unholy panchayat – all are untraceable; they have vanished into thin air. Another cover up is on the way. We are a cruel and heartless nation and we have lost all sense of decency. A stone is more God fearing than we are and the sad thing is, we don’t really care. I would have liked to have seen thousands take to the streets to hurl their indignation high into the air, but instead, there is calm all around. We have martial law, jirga law, panchayat law, civil law but the strange thing is, we have so many laws and yet, no law at all. So the poor can die or suffer in silence. The important thing is the mangoes are good this year and listen, the monsoons are just round the corner. The rain will wash away our sins.