#MainstreamFATA

Draconian laws which govern tribal areas take a momentary step into Twitter’s spotlight.

If you own a smartphone, chances are your morning starts with a side helping of checking notifications and scrolling through Twitter and Facebook. Monday morning, hundreds of tweets flooded timelines as activists, mostly from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, trended #MainstreamFata.

They demanded an end to the ‘special status’ of the tribal areas, that the Constitution, like in the rest of the country, also be applicable in Fata.

This is by no means a novel demand or an issue which only recently cropped up in the news. But, as the use of social media becomes more popular with Pakistanis, people who once found it hard to be heard have latched on with renewed hope. Twitter is the perfect space to toss up a sticky issue and watch the bees converge as it lands. If you tweet it enough times, with the right people following you, you can preach to the choir. And if it is retweeted enough times, there is a slight chance you can trigger a small revolution under the right circumstances.

In this (as yet) free arena for discourse and dissent, a concerted effort by the twitterati of K-P and Fata did not quite land a revolution but caused a stir with hashtag #MainstreamFata Sunday evening.

And so Twitter users demanded the government end the century-old Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), enforced by British colonisers and retained by the Pakistani government after independence. Those tweeting and those retweeting demanded the jurisdiction of the superior courts be extended to all seven quasi districts of the tribal area (the agencies) and six semi-autonomous Frontier Regions.

A senior lecturer, Noreen, who goes by the handle—@NoreenNaseer cited the declining economic conditions of tribes. She tweeted, “Political, social and economic transformation needed in Fata to empower the impoverished.”

Eventually, the hashtag snowballed; members of political parties and Twitter handles which are politically sympathetic to one party or another joined in.



Facts related to Fata were the main focus of the tweets, facts that show how deprived the areas are. How the situation in the tribal heartlands may get worse if the right reforms are not fashioned and implemented quickly. The outrage on Twitter has been steadily brewing, escalating after the FATA Reforms Commission (FRC) submitted its report to President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. A majority of the tweets under the trend are severely critical of the delay on behalf of the government and of portions of the report that suggest including Fata into the “mainstream” would not be possible immediately. The report suggests it will take years to develop the infrastructure required to be the backbone of more social reforms.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19^th, 2015.