Stripped naked

The other day I rang up my old college friend and roommate in Peshawar, Mian Jameel, and asked him how they were coping with the aftermath of the floods. His answer was brief but telling. He said, in Pahsto: “sailaab munga barbanda karru”, meaning the flood has stripped us naked, or exposed our nakedness. Other than washing away lives, houses, crops, roads and bridges, the flood has also peeled away the many layers of camouflage we have used for so many years to cover our nakedness: the poverty, inequity, administrative incompetence, greed and, of course, bigotry.

The flood brought to the surface widespread poverty that exists in the country. Until now, poverty was seen largely as a statistic in the various reports by the government or NGOs, a statistic that increased or decreased marginally without making a real impression on the consciousness of the urban elite. The people of Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and other large cities had not seen the face of real poverty in Pakistan. They have now, and they are surprised. The thousands of people they have been seeing on their TV screens for the last two months, wading through waist-deep waters, carrying their meagre belongings on their heads, or running after a food package callously tossed from a charity truck, have been there all along, tied to the land they did not own. The flood did not create them. It merely put them on display, so to speak, in our living rooms.

Also, the flood laid bare the chronic negligence and incompetence of successive governments in handling natural disasters. True, this particular disaster was huge, which would have been difficult for any government to handle, but this is not the first time Pakistan has experienced a flood. The first major flood hit Pakistan in 1950, reportedly killing 2,910 people. Considering that the population of Punjab then was only 20 million that was the deadliest flood in our history. Two more large-scale floods hit the country in 1973 and 1976, respectively. After each of these calamities, reports were written, recommendations were made, flood commissions were set up and enormous amounts of money were allocated and spent to control the damage the next time. But when the next time came, nothing seemed to work. In fact, nothing was in place.

Then there were reports from Punjab and Sindh of influential people breaching embankments to save their lands at the cost of drowning other villages and displacing their poor inhabitants. If true, this is not only callous but also criminal.

The floods also laid bare the increasing incidence of bigotry prevalent in our society. There were reports that different religious minority groups in Thatta, Muzaffargarh and some other places were denied shelter and relief. This was shameful, to say the least.

While heart-wrenching images of flood-affected people were shown on the TV screens across the country, a TV channel ran a crawl (patti) posing a multiple choice question to its viewers: Which one of the prophets was swallowed by a whale? Prophet Younas, Saleh or Yahya? The viewers were asked to text their answers and win a prize.

Come to think of it, there is a symbolic connection between the scriptural incident and the floods, and whatever else is happening in the country — theories being bandied to topple the government etc. Hazrat Younas survived the drowning and came out of it whole, will Pakistan, too? T

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th, 2010.