Her story also holds up a mirror to the country’s dark side
LAHORE: A four-day visit of Malala Yousafzai to Pakistan is redefining Pakistan’s image for the better globally. Malala may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but she remains an object of hate for many Pakistanis who view her as a Western agent on a mission to shame her country.
In a column written by Michael Kugelman for Foreign Policy, the writer manages to rightly point out the reason behind why many Pakistanis hate Malala. “In Pakistan, upward mobility is a very tall order. The poor struggle mightily to escape to prosperity. According to a 2015 study by Oxfam and the Lahore University of Management Sciences, 40% of the Pakistani children in the lowest economic quintile are expected to remain there for life. This entrenched inequality is easy to understand. For many poor Pakistanis, access to two key resources needed to escape poverty — education and land — is elusive. Nearly 60% of Pakistan’s poorest kids are not in school, and 70% of Pakistan’s rural poor are landless.
“And yet Malala bucked the trend and rose to the very top, from a schoolteacher’s daughter to a global celebrity. True, Malala was not living in abject poverty in her early years; her father owned a school and was an English-speaking activist. Additionally, she enjoyed the privilege of strong connections to Western media. She was writing for the BBC, after all, even before she was shot. Still, she’s in a far different place today — both literally and figuratively — than she was in the past.
“Pakistanis aren’t used to seeing this type of transformation — and particularly one that happens so quickly. And so, this disorienting reality provokes a range of responses. For some, it’s admiration. For others, it’s jealousy. For still others, it’s skepticism, suspicion and outright hostility.
“Malala personifies what is admirable about Pakistan and its people: youth, resilience, bravery and patriotism. But her story also holds up a mirror to the country’s dark side, not just in terms of terrorism, misogyny and conspiracy-mongering, but also its deep class divides and the sharply divergent worldviews generated by such fissures.”
Dr Zeeshan Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, April 3rd, 2018.
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