The oil tanker spill didn’t expose the ‘jahalat’ of the poor, but the inhuman apathy of the ‘educated’

Can one imagine the sight of 5,500 gallons of oil flowing wastefully, from the eyes of a person earning Rs300 a day?

One wonders if there’s a special hell for those who quickly assign blame to the society’s poorest and most vulnerable members in the wake of every catastrophe.

A second oil tanker has toppled in Vehari, and locals have been found attempting to pilfer its fuel. This is uncomfortably similar to the situation just a few weeks ago, when over 200 people lost their lives trying to collect fuel from an overturned tanker near Bahawalpur.

The victims and their families who beggared our sympathies, got caught in a storm of hostile opinions instead. Most disconcertingly, these opinions were all aired by the society’s most affluent and privileged quarters who may never know the dilemma of risking life and limb for a few liters of free fuel.

Sensationalist media coverage hasn’t helped. With all the punditry and expert analyses collectively dedicated to the oil tanker incidents in Ahmedpur Sharqia and Vehari, one would’ve assumed a proportionate amount of attention bestowed to the safety regulations concerning the transport of fuel by road.

Relatively little has been said about the actual agencies whose oil tankers got toppled. Instead, focus has been scandalously diverted to ordinary locals who responded to the spillage as any underprivileged person normally would.

There’s a word the upper class loves to use for situations like these – ‘jahalat’ (ignorance).

It’s no secret that all national disasters are followed by robust discussions on the dinner tables of Bahria and Defence, about the ‘jahalat’ of the public. These discussions, laced with cathartic name-calling at the country’s most destitute population, are always self-congratulatory in nature. The object is to take pride in one’s own ‘zahanat’ (intelligence), for knowing things that the common rabble just doesn’t get.

The upper class regularly brings into question the morality of those who are less privileged, addressing the insatiable greed of the ‘lower classes’. In case of the horrifying oil tanker disaster near Bahawalpur, one may even have heard callous remarks about the victims ‘deserving’ the fate for either being unwise or immoral. Many commenters on social media went as far as to object to the meager compensation being paid to the victims of oil tanker explosion.

Any conversation of this sort among members of the upper middle class always bears a classist and self-soothing subtext; we deserve to be up here, and they deserve to be down there.

To acknowledge one’s own socio-economic privilege would be counterproductive to the goal of gratifying oneself. To admit that ‘jahalat’ is not a genetic disorder, but a subset of poverty in a capitalist system, robs us of the justification to punch down on the country’s weakest citizenry with our ‘educated’ opinions.

It’s far too inconvenient to admit that the people who attempted to gather fuel from an overturned tanker were indeed aware that fuel is a flammable substance. That would mean that the people in Vehari and Ahmedpur knowingly risked their lives for that oil, which would imply economic desperation more than immorality or idiocy.

One may sit thousands of miles away in a gated community to judge and psychoanalyse the allegedly ‘jahil’ public of Ahmedpur and Vehari. But can one imagine what the sight of 5,500 gallons of oil flowing wastefully down the road, from the eyes of a person earning less than Rs300 a day?

We have become dangerously accustomed to excusing the atrocities of the system and assigning blame to the passive victims of these forces. Fingers are rarely pointed up at the powerful who create the conditions in which such accidents and disasters occur. They are instead jabbed down at those struggling to survive in conditions that they had no part in creating.

The oil tanker disaster did not expose the ‘jahalat’ of the underprivileged. It instead laid bare the inhuman apathy of the ‘educated’.