The writer is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor of biomedical engineering, international health and medicine at Boston University. He tweets @mhzaman
Our national policy seems to be based on using and reusing band-aids. When the country was shocked to the core last January with the incident in Kasur, the state’s response was a band-aid. It was not structural reform, not comprehensive protection of children, not addressing the core issues that make our children vulnerable — it was a band-aid. We were told that the Zainab’s case would be a turning point. Instead it became a point to turn our attention elsewhere. After a series of bombastic speeches, some chest thumping, we went back to our old ways. In the last year alone, dozens of similar stories in Punjab, K-P, Sindh and Balochistan have surfaced where young girls were raped and killed.
This January, we are, once again shocked to hear about what humans are capable of doing. Not just what those with big guns, but those with big cameras and even bigger mics. The brutality of those who empty their guns in the hearts of the family is followed by the deep insensitivity of those who only care about breaking news, and not broken hearts. Sometimes the band-aid is so obnoxious that it reeks of insensitive vulgarity. To give a bouquet to a kid who has seen his parents and his sister, butchered in front of his eyes, is beyond cruel. How can anyone do that? To imagine that no one in the CM’s entourage of ‘yes men’ had the human decency to stop him from doing so, tells you how heartless we have become. The only thing we seem to excel in, year after year, is showing newer ways of indecency and insensitivity. This is neither a political problem, nor a statement against one party or the other, it is simply a status report. Those who are now holier-than-thou in the southern province were conspicuously absent from any corrective action when 10-year-old Amal died in Karachi. So, from the cameramen who thrust a mic in front of a grieving child to the officer who calls the family terrorists to the politician who want to make sure that they either get in the photo or score political points, the rot is us.
The tragedies of Kasur and Sahiwal are not the only ones afflicting our children. Visit schools and hospitals, and you realise that our contract with children is, in fact, the state’s promise to keep them miserable, uneducated, unhealthy and unsafe. Sometimes our approach is aggressive, and often it is passive by simply abandoning them and their future.
The band-aid solutions as a formal policy go beyond children. The discussion about creating parallel legal structures is very much part of the approach. The problem is also not just a single stream of injustice. The young kids of Naqeebullah Mehsud and the beautiful family of SP Dawar demand justice and so do thousands of others whose loved-ones disappear as if they never existed.
Sometimes our band-aids cross over deep into the category of the absurd — like assuming that the solution to the ills of PIA will come from what music is played (or not) during take-off and landing.
I do not know when the day will come when we realise that we have deep, chronic and infected wounds that continue to spread — an infection that suo motus, impulsive actions or empty tweets won’t cure. I just hope that it is soon.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 22nd, 2019.
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