Moral panics

Societies have passed through stages when they are consumed with moral panics.

Over a hundred people have died in Punjab because somebody gave them spurious medicines. We still do not know whether the cheap medicines hospitals bought to pass on to the poor in the name of ‘welfare’ were contaminated, expired or sub-standard. We also do not know whether fake pharmaceutical companies push obscene quantities of such drugs into the market or only to hospitals. But we do know that the guilty will either not be found at all or, if discovered, will not be punished. In short, either heads will not roll or else the wrong ones will.

For, say what you will, heads do roll in the country such as that of Haqqani but then there are heads and heads and, of course, some heads are more equal than others. And we do know that there will be no moral panic about people dying in Lahore. People do, after all, keep dying like flies in Lahore and Karachi and Peshawar and in Quetta too. Sometimes it is the dengue virus which kills them because we do not kill it in time and we love the puddles in our cities even if it costs us lives. Sometimes they are killed because our political strongmen have to preserve their territorial niche — such as the famous ‘Kati Pahari’ in Karachi — and that takes lives on a daily basis in a never-ending vendetta. And sometimes the militants (our assets, anyone?) blow them up in suicide attacks if other things do not work. And then there are ‘the agencies’ and the ‘nationalists’ and crossfire and trigger-happy armed men. But then we do not practice family planning through other means so the only way we have of curtailing our population growth is to kill them off through these rather dramatic methods. There is no moral panic about these methods; we take them with philosophical fortitude.

So is there never any moral panic in Pakistan? Not even when there is a rocket attack on the PMA itself? Well, there is. Did you not see the ‘memogate’ moral panic. A letter to the Americans about which nothing was done and not much could have ever been done anyway did create a moral panic of sorts. But actual violation of the constitution — real takeovers by the army and suspensions of the constitution or the intention to change government by bribery or force — was celebrated with sweets. That was not a case for a moral panic. There was something of a moral panic when Osama was found holed up — if you can bring yourself to call a mansion a ‘hole’— near the PMA but not so much about him being there in the first place than about the Americans having taken him out. Then there is some moral panic about the loss of our sovereignty when the Ameicans, who are supposed to be our allies, use our air space or set foot in our country but none whatsoever when the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan is proclaimed and nobody is allowed to visit parts of FATA unless he has the equivalent of a visa from a local militant commander. Indeed, the militants could well have been ruling scenic Swat but for their ill-timed push into Buner with everybody praising their just administration. Of course we would have required permission to visit Swat. But such violations of sovereignty go unnoticed.

But over one thing there is the mother of moral panics. That is if young people meet each other in a public park. In that case middle-aged aunties raised during the Ziaul Haq years chase them with cameras, promise them that they would remain off-air and then record their confessions for all to watch and condemn. Such kind of intrusion into peoples’ private lives in the light of morality was officially encouraged during Ziaul Haq’s regime when policemen asked couples for their marriage certificate (nikah nama). How they went about it has been narrated by many people but let me refer the reader to Fouzia Saeed’s recent book Working with Sharks (OUP, 2012). She went with a male colleague after a UNDP conference to a lake near Islamabad and was chased by a Rawalpindi policeman and his civilian accomplice posing to be Islamabad policemen on duty. Most people would have given some hush-money and washed their hands off the whole sordid episode but no, not Fouzia Saeed. She got after the busybody and got him punished. Such men are dangerous and that is why most people would not have dared take them on but Fouzia is made of sterner stuff. Moreover, she has a wonderful family to support her including a husband who understands her. But how many of us have such assets at home? Very few indeed! Which is why the blackmailers find such easy preys.

The point I am trying to make is that this vigilantism which is creeping into our society will eat up the concept of privacy and tolerance. Societies have passed through stages when they are consumed with such moral panics. In medieval Europe and puritanical New England they caused much suffering. Old women were denounced as witches and burnt. In much of Pakistan and India, Valentine’s day is the day of resurgent moral panic. Every year couples are attacked in both countries in the name of morality. The assumption is that violence against people who have never harmed you; vulgar curiosity into other peoples’ affairs; violation of privacy — all these things are not immoral.

And yet history records how the Caliph Hazrat Omar (RA) was told by some people he had watched secretly that their privacy should not have been violated; that he should not have watched them in this manner in the first place. He did not punish them but we would if we could. For us violation of privacy and shaming young people is not wrong. The only thing which is wrong is if girl meets boy. That is the only thing the aunties fret and fume about while Rome burns around them. Drugs kill people in the winter and dengue in the summer and our assets all the year round. These things are not a case of moral panic but girl meets boy!

Published in The Express Tribune, February 1^st, 2012.