For whom the bell tolls

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main…

Each man’s death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee

— John Donne

In some macabre way, were you relieved to hear that the Manchester bomber was not connected to Pakistan? If so, you were not alone. There was an audible, collective sigh of relief from Pakistani officialdom and society as a whole when the bomber was identified as a 22-year old British citizen of Libyan descent.

This sigh of relief should be a cause of serious concern for us.

Decades of disillusionment with the state of affairs in the homeland have injected an element of sardonic self-imaging amongst us Pakistanis. Fatalism now flows freely through our bloodstream and infects our approach to every situation. Self-flagellation is a socially acceptable — perhaps even a fashionable — attitude. At the age of seventy, we have grown into a nation of certifiable cribbers.

Are then the cribbers to blame? Fatalism is often a product of expectations being smashed again and again. It perhaps births itself when repeated disappointments transform from sharp stabs of pain to a constant and never-ending dull ache. That’s when the struggle ends; when hope dims and when an acceptance of status quo begins to set in like freshly dried cement. That’s when laments turn into dark humour and negativity imbeds itself as a dominant behavioural attribute.

Remember the people who killed 60,000 of us? Remember those who slaughtered our children a few years ago? Remember them who wiped out entire families in Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi explosions? Remember them who played football with the decapitated heads of our soldiers and vowed to unleash rivers of blood on our streets? Remember those who supported them with their words and sentiments; who justified their murder and mayhem on the grounds of misplaced beliefs? Remember those who sanctioned a dialogue with them and offered to host their offices in our cities?

Now recall the vows and promises to bring them down; recall the plans, steps and ops to take them on; recall the hype, hoopla and hysteria generated with calculated intent to prove the tide was finally turning against them and in our favour. Recall all this and now scan the landscape for progress indicators.

A long line of terror-mongers strung up. Check. Terror camps across the Durand Line blasted by artillery fire. Check. High-profile murderers like Ehsanullah Ehsan surrendered. Check. Terror plots like the one in Lahore foiled and potential perpetrators like Noreen Leghari netted. Check. A visible reduction in attacks in major urban centres. Check.

But the limited progress on these fronts is dwarfed by the monumental failure in one key — and possibly the key — area: National Action Plan (NAP). Never was an acronym more appropriate in its verb form than this one. The abysmal failure of this plan, however, is less a breaking news and more a train wreck in slow motion. Why then this focus today?

In fact, the Manchester bombing — thousands of miles away as it is — rings a bell heard across the oceans. It is a bell whose shrill sound should echo in Islamabad and Rawalpindi and in all provincial capitals. The clanging noise should jolt us out of our JITs and court hearings and jalsas and rallies painting each other in bright hues of hate. There is an enemy that is yet to be vanquished.

And yet any unknowing person visiting this land of ours should not be faulted for imagining that our war against terror is far behind us. The lullaby of partisan politics has sedated us back into deceptive normalcy. The reimagining of terror is such that the shock of a suicide attack wears off before the dead are lowered into the ground. We believe we are fine, till the next attack happens. And then we are fine till the next one; and yet we are fine till…

Laments turn into dark humour and the sharp stab of disappointment transforms into a dull ache. The colossal failure of the combined leadership manifests itself in its absolute inability to solder a singularity of purpose. The artificial and superficial consensus on pursuing the common enemy has been ruptured by the glorious combination of incompetence, inability and ill-will borne of personal, political and institutional compulsions. It is a failure carved in crimson blood.

From whence did sprout such decay of purpose? Were not the madrassahs to be thoroughly reformed? Was not the criminal justice system to be revamped? Were not the curricula across this fair land to be cleansed of hate, bigotry and intolerance? And did we not really mean what we said when we carried the unbearable burden of small coffins on our shoulders?

Can you smell the scent of sin in the air? It is the sin of rupturing the resolve to combat terror in every shape and form; the sin of not crafting a powerful central narrative that paints our struggle as an existential one; and the sin of defacing the memory of our fallen by losing the zeal to fight the enemy on every front and reform ourselves on every front.

Feel your heart sink — for sink it shall at the prospects of another travesty to befall us and our loved ones. Feel the tightening in your stomach as fear strangulates you — for strangulate it shall at the imminence of bloodletting somewhere, sometime. And feel the inevitability of mayhem lurk around you like a menacing shadow — for lurk it shall at the promise of dark days.

The drip, drip, drip of enforced normalcy is the poison slowly being injected into our veins by a leadership that has bludgeoned itself into failure. There is no urgency, no earnestness, no zest; there is no resolve, no reform, no restructuring; there is no desire, no determination, no dedication to do what everyone has agreed to do; and there is a shocking lack of will to pluck out the roots of extremism and terrorism from our soil through a sustained and well strategised action.

The Manchester attack is oceans away and yet you hear the danger ringing like a bell. You ask for whom the bell tolls? It tolls for thee.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 28^th, 2017.

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