Time for Plan ‘B’

Plan ‘A’ evolved around the middle of Monday afternoon. A reasonably positive overview of where the country was headed. There was another Oscar in the bag for Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy; and although I utterly condemn the death penalty and have done since my teens the rule of law had at least prevailed and Mumtaz Qadri was no more. Enough, along with sundry other details, to craft something outside the cynically critical that is my usual position when commenting on all things governmental. By the morning of Tuesday Plan ‘A’ had crashed and burned. The haters were out in force for our Oscar winner and by noon 100,000 had gathered for the funeral of Mumtaz Qadri.

Pakistan is not comfortable with powerful women, and it never quite made up its mind about Benazir Bhutto either. I have not the slightest difficulty with powerful women, the more we have in positions of power in general terms then the better we all are. Not all are paradigms of shining virtue to be sure, and not all would I find myself a natural ally of — the support for a certain khaki dictator and some comments on IDP’s by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy suggest we do not share political bedrock — but she does make good films. Several are available in the marketplace that I have seen, and ‘Saving face’ is harrowing viewing, brilliantly and sensitively presented and well worthy of the Oscar it earned.

Her second Oscar is for a film I have yet to see about honour killing and I do not doubt it is any less well made and deserving. The two Oscar winners were about twin curses that afflict our culture — acid attacks and the murder of women in the name of ‘honour’. They are not unique to Pakistan, but are endemic. And the haters were out in force by Tuesday afternoon, condemning Obaid-Chinoy on social media, and when given the chance on TV channels as well — and even finding their way into the Senate where a motion in praise of her work and achievements was blocked.

Her crime? Presenting an ugly face of Pakistan, bringing the nation into disrepute, dragging our name in the dust. Negative Tweets were trending in the thousands. Turn the mirror around please, let us look into the non-reflective side, the side where we cannot see ourselves warts and all. The side that absolves us of responsibility.

The mirror of invisibility was also being held up elsewhere to another ceremony entirely different to that of the starry red-carpets of the Oscars ceremony. A funeral. The man being buried was a killer. A murderer who was entirely unrepentant of his actions up until the state in its turn murdered him. Instant martyrdom was conferred, hate speeches were made and the media, the beast that feeds on such events normally, was largely absent. The talking heads were silent. The channels found other things to talk about — like the future of short-form cricket and the price of petrol. Any mirrors tended to be held up in the foreign media both print and online, and there was at least one report on the Qadri funeral in the news broadcasts of a dozen states around the world. With pictures. And analysis. I checked.

Beyond the reporting of some very bare facts the ugly face of Pakistan was not on show, at least to its people the rest of the world notwithstanding. I do not have the space to unpack the argument about the rights and wrongs of this, but 100,000 ugly faces cannot be erased from collective memory. Taken together they speak of a state where murder is not only condoned but justified in the minds of large parts of the citizenry.

Those people attended the funeral not because they were forced to but because they wanted to. Because they thought that the man they were burying was entirely right in his decision to shoot the governor of Punjab 28 times at point-blank range. They believed that the state was wrong to kill a man they regarded as a hero.

Plan ‘A’ was as dead as a doornail. Back to the drawing-board, if only because it does not have a reflective surface.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3^rd, 2016.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.