Malala and the Nobel — the real issue

A Pakistani has won a Nobel Prize for a second time. A second time the Pakistani Nobel laureate cannot live in their own country. A second time the country is not solidly behind its own citizen which the world lauds. 1979 or 2014, everything has changed, but nothing has changed.

Enough has already been written on Malala’s historic moment and so I will not comment further, but allow me to dwell a little on the larger topic of child rights in South Asia.

First, it is very significant that Malala’s co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is Kailash Satyarthi, a child rights activist from India. This joint win clearly exhibits that despite the attempts to show India and Pakistan as polar opposites, by certain quarters in both countries, their problems, solutions, and indeed destinies, lay intertwined. For example, Mr Satyarthi has to date saved more than 80,000 children from the menace of child labour in India — something which still plagues Pakistan. His work is as critical in India as it is in Pakistan. Similarly, issues relating to child education (both Pakistan and India have a right to education law), and especially girl child education and basic rights, are a shared struggle. By recognising the joint struggle of India and Pakistan in this endeavour, the Nobel committee has certainly put us in the right perspective.



Secondly, a few weeks ago, I watched a very well-made documentary from Britain’s Channel 4 entitled, “Pakistan’s Hidden Shame”. It is a harrowing tale of people we see almost every day in our lives but care little about — street children. There are about four million street children in Pakistan — in itself a tragic situation — but what is worse is that a large percentage of these children are regularly sexually abused. We all know about it — tales of such atrocities abound —but neither society nor the government seems to care much. A society’s progress is certainly known by how it treats is most vulnerable and our ambivalent attitude towards protection of street children is simply unforgiveable. Time has come for the government to make clear laws protecting children from child abuse and increasing arrest and prosecution of offenders. What use is there of the government to protect us from the Taliban when a percentage of our next generation is repeatedly being dehumanised under our own eyes?

Thirdly, I want to raise the issue of child abuse within families. Recently, I have come across many people who were abused as children, and even in their twenties and thirties — and even later — the memory of those events scars them deeply. For those of you who have seen the recent movie, Highway, character Veera’s (Alia Bhatt) monologue about her repeated abuse by an ‘uncle’ is not just a film script but a reality suffered by hundreds of thousands in our midst. Over the years, I have repeatedly heard the complaint in Pakistan that in the ‘West’, children have too many rights and can even get their parents arrested for slapping them. While some child protection laws in the West might have gone a bit overboard, generally these are very good laws and protect children to a large extent. Paedophilia is a real crime and is pervasive in our society and needs to be controlled immediately. The emotional and psychological scars children suffer at the hands of such monsters affect them for their whole lives and it is our duty as a society to help prevent such happenings.

Being a historian, I usually have a pessimistic view about drastic changes in society. Hence, my scepticism about the ‘inquilab’. However, if in reality things are changing, and the country is waking up to smell the coffee, so to speak, should and can we not begin with protecting the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society? Only then will the real inquilab begin.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 14^th, 2014.

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