Fathering Pakistan

In simpler and more innocent times, lessons in grammar taught us that countries were almost always “she” – that which created and nurtured, and that we were supposed to serve till death do us part. But perhaps Pakistan has already been stripped of its femininity, nurturing virtues of motherhood replaced by the control and discipline of patriarchs. Pakistan is officially Fatherland.

A state, in theory, has monopoly over coercive means. In Pakistan, this right is extended to the monopoly over violence by fathers obsessed with honour and their manhood. This is a Pakistan that threatens to stunt the growth of today’s children, for patriarchs’ control over our lives has become uncomfortably intrusive. Can we not see the irony in Pakistani security apparatus following the blueprint of the KGB – a force not only once derided as infidels by the conservative right, but also held up as an example of what a security apparatus should not be doing? They said the KGB was insecure, unsure of what its citizens would do if left to their own devices. That in its maddening quest for ideological homogeneity, the KGB had lost sight of who it was supposed to serve and protect.

Pakistani security agencies are on the same trail – unsurprising perhaps, given how the military establishment is squeezed between allegations of mistrust abroad and brutalities at home. Despite journalists and their associations calling for protection of their profession, and some recrimination in cases where colleagues have wither been silenced for life or beaten brutally to make examples out of them, security personnel continue to harass working journalists. Some 16 journalists were killed in the past 18 months, many like The News’ Umar Cheema, ARY’s Quetta Bureau Chief Mustafa Tareen, and most recently Guardian’s Waqar Kiani were beaten up for unfavourable reportage. Awaz TV’s Abdul Salaam Soomro, who captured the footage of Rangers’ shooting at a young man, is safe for now since the incident is fresh in people’s memories. A female colleague was recently tailed all the way home in Karachi – something that she did not know but was made aware of through an “unknown number”. There are countless others who report on separatist movements in Balochistan and Sindh, but are beaten up for doing so. Many face surveillance and tapping of their phone calls, however private they may be.

These people, among many others, are the insolent children of a Pakistan created by the establishment. In our patriarchs’ disciplinary regime, there is little space to accommodate dissent – where dissension is in terms of reporting excesses or violence meted out by the state. Are we at war within? Or is it that patriarchs are always at war with their disobedient children?

Beyond a certain age, all parents must let go – traumatic as severing the umbilical chord may be. “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1849 in an essay on civil disobedience. Thoreau’s main contention was that citizens must not allow governments to have such overbearing influence in their private lives that their conscience becomes but an extension of the government’s will. If citizens let governments do as they please, they risk becoming agents of injustice.

Pakistan seems to be mired in that phase of limited monarchy – after all, it is hard for patriarchs to let go before their children become a mirror image of themselves. Due to our own policy of becoming a front-line state in the war on terror, the spotlight on our words and deeds is undoubtedly intense. Narratives that differ from the state’s are often of interest to the media in the West, still obsessed with its status of the Occident. But essentially, these are our debates and critical for our future. We might be washing our dirty linen in public, but a public space is precisely where such filth has to be washed. This is the only way to reconcile oppressed nations and people in Pakistan. But will dad understand?

I’ll be the first to admit, I was a bad son this Father’s Day. But with our patriarchs insisting on being invasive, I cannot bring myself to muster more than a silent tut-tut on a speculative story about the possibility of an improbable coup in the army. My own father has always been nurturing and supportive, always putting his family before himself. Perhaps, I haven’t been able to reconcile the establishment’s ‘fatherhood’ with what I experienced as a child. Perhaps I never will.

Happy Father’s Day.

The writer is Deputy City Editor, Pakistan Today, Karachi