A tear on stone impressed

Voltaire upheld reason rejecting arbitrariness. He refuted the belief that events in time and history – the cosmos, culture, language, wars, earthquakes, floods, famines and pestilences – have a foreordained purpose and design. There is no pre destination. He was a firm believer in human reason, free will, individual and social responsibility.

As many as 147 persons, out of which 132 were small children, were gruesomely murdered by terrorists on 16 December 2014 in Army Public School, Peshawar. Nine and a half years have elapsed without enforcement of full accountability, giving the depraved impression that we too are wedded to fore-ordainment, believing that the incident had to occur and couldn't have been avoided.

From this follows the undefendable concept that no one was responsible or accountable for the dastardly act. The bleeding heart of the mother of a tender dead child finds to this day no healing!

Our attitude, individually and collectively, towards avoidable upheavals experienced since 1947 is very close to what the master of enlightenment so vehemently rejected in logic, reason and rationality.

Preordainment refutes free will and discards the notion that humans are rational beings who carve out their own fortunes rather than being mute and sterile subjects of a pre-written destiny.

To uphold predetermination is to dismiss and reject free will, human responsibility and accountability, foreclosing avenues for self-improvement and ensuring that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.

As if in helpless acceptance of fate, society and state seem to be afflicted by heartless unconcern to answer the tearful questions of the crying mothers: who took my child? Who was responsible? And what was done to bring justice to the homes and souls of our bereaved?

But this was not the first of the many mishaps whose litany is stretched and long: the language issue of early 1950s, the dismissal of the NWFP government on 22nd August 1947, the hanging, in cold deception, of the sons of Nawab Nauroz Khan Zehri of Balochistan in 1959, the judicial murder of a Prime Minister who gave the country its only enduring Constitution, the 1971 East Pakistan fiasco, the policies that led to initiation of sectarianism, Jihadism and militancy, the Kargil debacle and the more recent political experimentations of the introduction of a 'third force' in national politics are some of the events that are worth recounting.

If history is the unfolding of a blind force or will, unshaped or uninfluenced by human endeavour, then from this standpoint it is but a small step to the position that history can, and often is, moulded to what one wants it to appear and become.

To ascertain the facts and affix responsibility for the APS incident two judicial actions ensued. The Supreme Court took sou motu notice and also appointed a Peshawar High Court judge as a Judicial Commission. In its 500-page report submitted to the Supreme Court Chief Justice in July 2020, the Judicial Commission indicated that 27 persons were involved in the planned attack out of which 9 were killed, 12 arrested and 6 disappeared.

The crux of the Report attributed the incident to a grave 'security lapse' but astonishingly discovered that the number of security guards had been reduced and there were also issues of non-compliance with places of duty.

The Judicial Commission, by restricting its scope to security failings, abjured the responsibility to try delving into and ascertaining policy and strategic antecedents which created the circumstance leading to militancy in the country and society.

Justice Gulzar Ahmed, the Supreme Court Chief Justice then, did hint at this issue in his observation in the suo moto proceedings that "security agencies should've been aware of the planning and execution of such an attack", but stopped short of enquiring into the real reasons why Pakistan has been under terrorist attacks ever since it joined the US war on terror on September 2001, with the formal establishment of TTP in 2007.

During the SC hearing, the parents of the deceased children had pleaded that cases should be registered against the relevant military as well as political authorities serving in 2014. Upon query of the Chief Justice whether the demand of the parents had been brought to the notice of the Prime Minister, the Attorney General stated that these persons had not been assigned any role by the Enquiry Commission in so far as the incident was concerned and nor had anything adverse been stated against them. The answer was: These persons had been held only "morally responsible". The desideratum was, "We admit all our follies but FIRs cannot be lodged against higher authorities without any basis."

A lot of apparent huff and puff was expended in the august chambers of the court but the agony and hurt of the bereaved families couldn't then, and yet remains to be, assuaged. The Chief Justice made a trenchantly revealing observation: "It is a pity that no one has informed about who was responsible."

The parents of the dead children listened in silent awe to the Chief Justice's remarks: "Pakistan has always faced the problem that in any incident those at the lowest levels are arrested while no questions are asked about the big fish."

Nine years down the road, militancy, after questionable attempts at a patchup, is on the ascent. Each new death and each effort at rapprochement with the killers brings back a tear expressed in this poem: A Tear on Memory's Stone Impressed.

The gendarme / Salutes / And lays

Yellow flowers / On your tiny barricades / Of small desks and tablets / Soiled red cakes

Amman tears / We shed / We were not / Ashamed

You couldn't understand / With your innocences