Sometime during the late sixties, Asif Bhatti was born in the small town of Hafizabad in central Punjab. As the son of a small landholding peasant, bred by the gracious waters of the Chenab, he was no different from countless others conceived and given birth to in the same month, in the same area. All of these children would, in time, represent Punjab the same way their fathers and grandfathers had done before them.
Incidentally though, this was not the Punjab of their fathers or grandfathers. This was a fundamentally different land all together. This was the Punjab shaped by the effects of a determined variant of post-colonial modernity, i.e., the Green Revolution.
The onslaught of roads, of new markets, of transport and mechanisation, of radio broadcasts, and travellers from all sides of the river, meant that for the first time in the thousand-year history of this province, the moral economy of a million peasant households was breached by ideas of a world way beyond their immediate horizon.
Asif Bhatti was born in one such household.
His father, having lived exactly the way his ancestors before him, was not content in watching his son grow up to till the same plot of land and live his life according to the whims of nature. No sir, Bhattis father wanted his son to be educated, so Asif was sent first to the local school and then subsequently to a college located some 30 miles away in the town centre. He would come home after classes, sit in the feet of his father and in the company of his sisters, and would tell them of this wider world everyone was talking about.
Like many others, Asif soon outgrew Hafizabad and eventually moved to Lahore to study at one of the citys many prestigious institutes of higher learning. It was in one such place that Asif was thrust headfirst into the realm of ideas.
Surrounded by teachers who could quote Descartes and Voltaire as easily as they could quote Ghalib and Iqbal, this peasant boy from Hafizabad slowly began to see possibilities of a starkly different kind of existence. He would still go home every now and then and tell his family about these new ideas and concepts but his thoughts, now fundamentally altered by the reality of urban existence, were incredibly out of place on the still banks of the Chenab.
Ultimately, it was on one such visit that Asif Bhatti would leave a lasting impact on the psyche of his own household.
Sitting under a tree with his sisters, Asif Bhatti casually asked one of them if she had found a suitable boy for marriage. For five minutes, the weight of these seemingly innocuous words did not register with her at all. At first, she thought this was a joke of a lewd and callous nature, not to be taken seriously for even a moment. After he inquired again, she realised that her brother was genuinely curious, so she responded in the way her instinct told her to: by bursting into tears.
Asif left for Lahore the next day, but his sister continued to weep for a week after his departure.
In that one moment, where he raised the question of whether his sister had exercised her God-given agency to find a suitable companion, Asif had shattered the thousand-year-old social fabric of Punjab. In one sentence, deep seated notions of social honour, gender segregation, of patriarchy, of pre-defined and religiously-ordained roles and characters were swept away.
Asif Bhatti eventually became a progressive journalist for an Urdu newspaper in Lahore, plying his trade during the oppression of the 80s. His sister, after all the tears, eventually married a boy of her liking.
In the wake of Shahbaz Bhattis assassination, I find myself utterly unequipped to write an emotional exhumation of any kind. I have little hesitation in admitting that I am untrained and unworthy of writing eloquent obituaries for both man and country. This story, however, about a young boy from Hafizabad, who found ideals of plurality and fulfilment from the education he received in Lahore, is the only thing I could think of in the immediate aftermath of both Taseers and now Shahbaz Bhattis murder.
Amidst the shrill, albeit segregated, cacophony of voices pleading introspection and self-reflection, the only solution I can see is that we need more Asif Bhattis. There is little question that the demise of critical thinking and pluralistic notions of existence from within the educated classes is one of the major factors contributing to the rapid implosion of our society. We can only have more Asif Bhattis if the insulation of tolerant ideals from the rest of the country ends and these ideals are brought back into public universities, and subsequently within reach of our middle classes.
There is no other time to reverse this trend and stem our downward spiral than the present. What keeps me optimistic, however, is that if a boy reared in the reactionary bastion of this country, i.e., central Punjab, can not only imbibe but also preach such values, there is a chance that such a proliferation is possible once again.
The writer works in the social sector and blogs at http://recycled-thought.blogspot.com. Contact him at [email protected]
