The Soft Side

MAY 2004 - In Pakistan, the argument often advanced for the cruel treatment meted out to animals is that when human beings are made to suffer so much, what difference does it make if animals are treated badly? It is a fallacious line of thinking but it is a popular one. For one thing, it enables many of us to make convenient adjustments which absolve us of responsibility towards others and gives us the freedom to go on doing whatever we were doing without any pangs of remorse or regret.

There is a newspaper cutting lying among papers in my writing desk dated 11 February 2004. It shows a rundown, ramshackle, filthy market front. There are two shops in the picture. The one on the left is some quack, Naseem Shafakhana where all kinds of miracle cures are available for the price of nothing. A long, multicoloured board on the side lists these wonders and on the side rests a half-broken ladder. However, it is the large cage on the right that makes you sit up. A shop at one time – one of those box types that are spread all across the country, perhaps eight feet or ten across, it has a rusting cage trapped inside which stands a lion and what appears to be a lioness. The cage may be large enough to keep a dog but two lions packed together, is such a travesty of justice that it makes the blood boil. The two lions gaze out in despair at what must be a busy and noisy market. In front of their cage is a stuffed bear and an animal that is either made of fiberglass or plaster and bears some resemblance to the cat family – maybe it is a bear, the work is so grotesque that it is hard to recognize. A broken stool and a table with a plastic chair and a long wooden pole – to keep the lions in check, are displayed as well. This shop located in Bhatti Chowk (where is that in Lahore?) belongs to the quack who uses the live animals to advertise his miracle cures. The headline on the picture, ‘SOS to animal rights’ activists’ is a sad reminder that will not stir any animal activist. Probably there aren’t any. To the best of my knowledge, following the printing of this picture in a national newspaper, there has not been a single reference to this wanton cruelty to the two animals, there has not been a single letter to any newspaper and the newspaper that showed the picture has not gone back to report if, by some miracle, someone somewhere had taken swift action to free the two lions from this cruel captivity. I cannot even begin to think what conditions now prevail in that cage with temperatures in excess of 40C.

It is therefore with some amusement that a friend who runs a very successful business in Pakistan arrived earlier this week and said he wanted to petition the Prime Minister to take action on half a dozen issues that cannot wait any longer and must be resolved. While the Prime Minister may have other heavier issues weighing on his mind – like quelling the 125th rumour that he is about to be replaced, my friend was fired up in his own quiet way and determined to ‘reach’ the Prime Minister. Among the list of his demands is serious and sustained measures to dispose off thousands of cases that are lying scattered around hundreds of courts in Pakistan, where petitioners trudge up and down, dusty broken corridors, victims of a callous and indifferent system that ruins hundreds of lives, breaks hundreds of homes and shows no signs of getting better. Others even less fortunate than those seeking a slip of paper with twenty signatures scrawled all over the page in language no one can quite decipher, rot in jails, year after year, much like the two lions. Inside these horror chambers, women prisoners are methodically and efficiently raped all year round and many even deliver babies who when they are grown up will be raped too and if they are of the right sex, will surely be sodomised. These things may shock genteel folk but worse things happen in this country built for the greater glory of Islam. My friend’s list had another item that surprised me. He wished to know if it was within the Prime Minister’s power to free all caged birds that we all see ever so often and about which we collectively do nothing. He felt that if the leader of the country’s government cannot even free caged birds what possibly could he ever do to tackle the huge list of problems that cry out for solutions? This is a question none of us can answer. The Prime Minister may be able to dispose off a former Chief Minister who made a foolish and in the end, a pathetic and farcical attempt to land in Lahore (and lead his people to the promised vision), but setting free millions of caged birds is I think a little beyond His Heaviness. My friend is however undeterred and plans to somehow get his petition into the public forum, notwithstanding the reality that whatever public conscience we had, if we had any, died years ago and there is little hope of its revival.

There are far too many things that are not going right yet somehow whoever the Almighty chooses to run this country seem to be singularly blessed with what can only be called, tunnel vision. Focused always on how to stay on in power and strengthen the hold while demolishing the opponents whatever it takes and paying little attention to what are now critical priorities for this country – this is a pattern that has become a steel mould and all who arrive in Islamabad riding on a cavalcade of confiscated trucks or sloppily hijacked national carriers, soon enough fall into the predictable slot. Lots of talk and little to show for it. The progress touted at regular press briefings are often questionable and once the rulers have been replaced with a new cast, the nation is informed that all the progress that was front page news for years was actually concocted. However, we are informed, such is not the case now and the new leader, General so and so, Makhdom such and such, Mian so and so, Chaudhry such and such, is truly a man of vision whose heart bleeds for the common man and who will spare no efforts and so on. Bitter pills made even bitterer as the years go by. We have excellent roads in Gulberg and Cantonment Lahore, my friend Mr. Lashari is ‘dating’ Islamabad with imported and air freighted date palms at a reported Rs.90, 000 a throw from far off Brunei and will soon make Islamabad look like a middle eastern monarchy and Karachi has another Defence colony coming up at the speed of sound, but for the rest, it is another miserable summer with constant power breakdowns. In our private hells, spare a thought for those donkeys who trudge up and down our scorching roads, carrying cargo on hardy and thin legs, that always seems and is far beyond their capacity, but they cannot speak, the whip is swift and the wounds fester. So they plod on, silently bearing the cruelty with such dignity that one wishes some of us could exhibit. I am in that tribe of people who believe that nations which show no mercy to their animals don’t go very far. Stories about our great sport, bear baiting are now documentary features shown around the world. This is the currently popular slogan, ‘Pakistan’s soft side,’ that’s caught Islamabad’s fancy. We may have fashion models strut on the catwalks of Europe but there is no soft side if we are heartless inside.