I am, dear readers, a Pashtun. And by that, I mean the real deal. Not like the fellow from Bani Gala.
I actually speak Pashto at home. At times, I let slip a word or two of Pashto when I am speaking Urdu quickly. I am fiercely proud of my ethnicity. Not the racist, xenophobic kind of proud, but the NAP-like, inclusive, kind of proud. The sort who believes everyone, everywhere should be proud.
That was just my preface, lest anyone accuse this of being racist.
To the issue at hand: every now and then, when there is tension between India and Pakistan, there is a slew of videos that resurface online that feature Pashtuns swearing at India.
There are usually arms on display in these. In pidgin Urdu, we see these fellows scream to the imaginary Indian audience (usually Prime Minister Modi himself) that if they were to even dare to attack Pakistan, the Pashtuns were enough to completely destroy India.
These videos are shared online gleefully by the Punjabi-Urdu-speaking mainstream. There is a comic element to them. But appreciative. Look Modi, what to speak of the Pakistan army, only our Pashtuns are enough to take care of you.
Hamaray toh sirf Pathan hee kaafi hain!
Were these very same Pashtuns to work as domestic labour in Lahore cantonment, they would have a different story to tell. Were they to live in Lahore’s walled city (and many of them do) they would see posters by locals warning citizens to keep a lookout for these outsiders. And this is Lahore, a city that is not all too hostile. Things get far more scary in Karachi.
But the fact of the matter is that perhaps things are the scariest for them in Pashtun areas themselves. KP, Balochistan, Fata. The attack on the Quetta Bar, the attack on the Bacha Khan University, the attack on the courts in Mardan, the blast in Mohmand. The list is long…
The political class — the entire spectrum, more or less — of the Pashtun belt has a strong suspicion (confirmed by retired senior military officials) that the state is complicit in facilitating the militants that are then facilitating the militants that carry on these activities. From the ANP, which has been saying this the loudest — and for the longest time — to the JUI-F, whose leaders openly question the policy of having Good Taliban.
Even the Pashtun members of the PTI know this; merely lack the courage to say it out loud. But the political class doesn’t call the shots, does it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2WwpF114Sc
The promise of social media (which is being leveraged by these Pashtuns) was to take the mic away from the mainstream media and give it to the people, right? Well, that didn’t have quite the effect it was meant to have.
Because, as the writer Stuart McMillen notes in his brilliant graphic essay “Amusing ourselves to death,” Huxley’s dystopia wins over the Orwellian dystopia. There would be no need to control or withhold information, like Orwell feared, because there would be an overload of information, as Huxley predicted, where no one would care about the issues that matter. Or actually know what was going on. No reason to ban books because no one will read books. The public will rather consume milli naghme.
It doesn’t then matter if the people have the mic, because they are state-fed automata, who will parrot what the state says anyway.
Muhammad Ali, the one who floated like a butterfly, when asked why he famously refused to serve in the Vietnam War despite being drafted, said, “No Vietnamese ever called me N***er.”
Now Narinder Modi is a terrible man, he really is. One wonders, however, what he did to the Pashtuns.
Post-script in 2018: The basic scheme of things remains the same since this article was first published in 2016. The Gul Khans (Uncle Toms, as black rights activists in the US use the term) still remain the same. But it would be wrong of me not to acknowledge one change that has taken place. The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement.
Manzoor Pashteen, Ali Wazir, Mohsin Dawar and their scores of supporters have taken part of my analysis above and smashed it to smithereens. Give us the mic, they said, and we will cry just how naked the emperor is. Having a social media following that pop stars would drool at, Pashteen has leveraged the medium effectively. Not automata but vocal and problematic gadflies for the state. Their voice rises above the white noise of patriotic songs and mindless content. It’s loud enough for the state to get uncomfortable.
Why uncomfortable? Because it is a Gandhian mindf*ck that they play with the state. Just the way Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence was directed at the British living back home, telling them they were not as civilised to these non-violent folk in India, the PTM also has a rather simple demand: enforce the 1973 constitution. It is very difficult to shout “traitor!” to that.
