140 dead and 538 injured – this little byline cuts through hearts and our future!
Yesterday was the day of images – moving pictures of excitement, energy, applause and then the saddest of recent tragedies. Innocent men and women charged with emotion and enthusiasm were blown away by suicide bombers, remote devices and alien belief systems. Or was it the case of wilful machinations and deceit. Only time will tell.
She had arrived much like the Greek characters – tearful, maligned, triumphant and a little pawn in the hands of gods. Amid the voices of criticism and hypocrisy that fail to note the complexity of our times, she emerged as a people’s woman – once again. Here were the loyalists dancing, singing and clapping – their queen, exiled and beaten had re-emerged.
They couldn’t care about the cost or the process. That was for the armchair classes of Pakistan to ponder about. The pull of Bhutto-name for the have-nots was once again re-established. So began a journey on the blood-lined roads of Karachi that have cracked with violence, blood and lawlessness. Yet they moved ahead oblivious of the fault lines that run from the drab, destroyed villages of Afghanistan to Karachi passing through a web of seminaries, officialdom and Lal Masjids of this world.
And so halfway, this peaceful journey – a testament of what the real Pakistan is all about – halted. And, something had erupted: imperial projects, state diktats and the crumbling centre. There was flesh, blood, fire and tears. And the wretched TV screens have documented all of this.
Devastating is one word that replaced amazing by the time we crossed the midnight in Pakistan! To quote Rumi here
A splinter is often
difficult to get out.
How much more difficult a thorn
in the heart! If everyone could find that thorn
in themselves, things would be
much more peaceful here!
There is a head now flashed on the screens – they can’t tell if it was a Jiyala or the suicide bomber. The TV channels are flashing bodies again and again – as before, discretion was thrown to winds and we have the singular honour of being a country where human limbs and guts of the dead are not just flashed but imposed on the senses until you are numb, exhausted and terrified. And, glorifying terror is the last thing we need.
Urooj Zia, a newspaper reporter was there:
“The bomb blasts happened while we were there. I was stunned, to say the least. There were people, bits of people, blood EVERYWHERE. An AryOne World cameraman lay there dying in front of us. We moved him to a police mobile, but he died in the hospital. I knew he would. I got his blood all over me — my hands, arms, clothes, shoes. Then there were charred bodies of policemen — smoke rising from them. Slippery blood everywhere….I went back to work after that, filed my story. Got home around 04:00 a.m., couldn’t sleep for two hours coz I couldn’t get the images out of my head. Puked a couple of times too.”
This tragedy is not just about who is responsible for this carnage. When humanity is in danger, we have to rise above our biases and loyalties and condemn what is WRONG. This is an issue that we all have to now live and deal with.
Our religion does not allow targeting women even in wartime and suicides are FORBIDDEN. Period. There is now a consensus at Al-Azhar and various other places of Islamic scholarship. If this is about Waziristan or the Lal Masjid then it should be fought elsewhere and not against the unarmed, dispossessed political workers.
All Pakistanis have to unite in condemning this barbarity. And all variants of Pakistaniat ought to be involved in this process – bickering at this stage will only make us question as to what message are we sending to the world, that we to quote Qandeel Shaam are “multiple little groups all bopping their heads against one another”?
Violence, militancy and suicide attacks are and will remain unacceptable. Legitimate politics must not give way to war-lord-ism! I end with Faiz:
abhii chiragh-e-sar-e-rah ko kuchh Khabar hii nahin
abhii garaani-e-shab mein kami nahin aaii
najaat-e-deeda-o-dil kii ghadi nahin aii
chale chalo key wo manzil abhii nahin aaii
To Mr. Siddique.
Are you saying that the ” innocent” voters of Pakistan incapable of electing “Good Leaders”, therefore educated elites should decide the fate of the nation by selecting the leaders,?
@Pejamistri,
You have a very simplistic definition of a leader. A leader of robbers also have the trust of his fellow robbers but is he capable of leading a nation?
The voter turnout in Pakistan is always in the 20-25% range so by your own definition there are only 25% of voting age Pakistanis who “trust” BB, Nawaz, Mullahs etc.etc. leaving a silent majority who don’t trust the system and the product of this political system. Remember, an omelet made of rotten eggs will always be rotten.
As far as the “innocent” voters of Pakistan are concerned, I was easy on them by calling them innocent and not ignorant. The truth is that they are closer to the later adjective. Pick any 100 people from a PPP procession at random and ask them about the manifesto of the party and then see how many actually know what they are voting for. Repeat the process with PML and MMA processions and results will be very same.
Look at the structure of political parties in Pakistan and tell me if that is the way of democracy. We are ruled by people belonging to the lucky sperm club, not real leaders.
If you don’t agree with me, just go back to 1988 when we had a 37 year old “leader” whose processions and rallies showed the “trust” of the people of Pakistan. No one back then stopped to think if this lady had done anything in her life to earn that trust and to claim that leadership. We thought that trust was a hereditary trait that can be passed on from generation to generation? It is that thinking my friend that will leave us in this abyss of political anarchy until we seek out an alternate leadership with an alternate political system .
more than hundred ppl lost their lives, right.
i bet bombs werent aimed at Benazir, bombers wanted to teach common ppl a lesson that if you keep supporting politician like Benazir than we are here to make your life hell.
Isn’t it some kind of vigilante group who have lost all their hopes to get justice from anywhere and now have taken matters in their hands.
All of us claim that we are patriot, can we see our country going into the hands of those who LOOTED the wealth of this poor nation mercilessly???
or is it soemthing else,
As everything is permissible in war, its not a war against any party but its a war to save the country from falling into the hands of traitors.
I suspect that this carnage was planned by some Patriotic men with in the agencies who some how made a truce with Benazir due to the international pressure especially from the US but didnt endorse it willingly and came up with this ghastly plan to sabotage her arrival just to send a clear message to her patrons that she can’t get easily what she is here for.
Is someone playing DOUBLE GAME again???
Very thoughtful post at a time when people are in despair and despondency. It is undoubtedly need of hour to think collectively and work for peace otherwise this split will be irreversible and violence will be uncontrollable.
I can just help smiling when people talk about “alternate leadership”, “corrupt leadership “, “genuine leadership”. All these words are favorite terms of dictators.
Leadership by definition means leading the people and it comes when people start trusting a person or group of persons. A leader is the one whom people trust and will follow him or her. I might be the most honest person in the world, may possess the best qualities but if people don’t trust me then I am not a leader.
Dictators know that people don’t trust them, by coining the terms like corrupt leadership, they actually try to erode the trust of people from their actual leaders. Their logic is “if you don’t trust me , don’t trust anyone else too”.
A dictator is always afraid of leader, his first and foremost effort is to keep the leaders away from people. He wants to malign the leadership by mud sliging , he tries to terrorise people to stop them to follow their leaders.
And last but not the least , voters are not “innocent”, they are rational human beings they know where their interst lies , they choose thier leadership with full conciusness , that’s why Jinnah once said “The people’s opinion can never be wrong”.
Jinnah, Gandhi, Bhutto, Benazir, Nawaz Sharif have only one thing in common i.e. people’s trust. As a human being they may be honest, intelligent, corrupt, dumb and anything a human being could be. But leadership has no adjectives.