Selling our children

Joseph Kony & the CII have something in common; both of them do not believe in any exceptionalism for kids.

Joseph Kony is a formidable candidate for being the most evil man in the world. The criminal enterprise (rebel group, if you please) that he heads and runs is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA is responsible for mayhem, pillage, abduction, murder and rape, all at hysterical scales in Uganda and Sudan, most of it done through children. Kony’s stated objective is to establish a system of governance based on the original Ten Commandments; however, aside from willingness to kill in indiscriminate and large numbers for the said aim, Kony or the LRA have never bothered with expanding on their political philosophy. The driving principle is death and destruction.

The LRA can be used as plug or peg for pontificating on multiple issues in Pakistan every day. Criminal murderous organisations seeking blood in the name of faith: however one is made to think of it today for another (perhaps related) issue. Kony and the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) have something in common (surprise, surprise); both of them do not believe in any exceptionalism for kids, perhaps are not particularly sold on the idea of childhood at all. Kony uses child-soldiers to kill women, men and children. The CII believes that being a child is no grounds for protection from marital obligations. This is admittedly, a very cold phrasing of the CII stance. To put it alternatively, the CII is in favour of ‘Child-Marriages’. Bureaucratised language and legal terms such as Child-Marriages do not immediately communicate what is being proposed. Female children not mature enough to give consent for marriage can marry and more significantly, can be married off to probably older men. ‘Child-Rape’ is admittedly a more chilling term.

There are some who would say that it is only that the CII disagrees with the definition and parameters of adulthood. This is ridiculous; anyone who has children or really, has seen enough children, can claim to recognise who is a child when she sees one. It is too strenuous to argue with the CII on maturity being a separate concept from puberty etc. To resort to the old cliche, you cannot reason people out of positions that they have not reasoned themselves into.

This is not the first time that the CII has come up with bizarre recommendations (most recently, the DNA evidence in rape cases episode) and it certainly will not be the last. The CII has only advisory jurisdiction and should be ignored. Indeed, it should be ignored. However, that alone will not suffice. It has to be disbanded. As a general principle, one should be sceptical about bodies having grand-sounding names (The Guardian Council in Iran and Plato’s Nocturnal Council, e.g.) since they have a tendency of promising much more than they can deliver. The CII has displayed consistency in spending inordinate amounts of time thinking about women and the menace they pose to us as a society. The CII has almost always been like this; this is not new. What is very slightly new or different, is our reaction or in this case, non-reaction to it. Barring one or two political parties, nobody even issued token condemnation statements merely to say that “we will not allow our women and children to be left to the mercy of unbalanced old men” — not even that was said. The federal government responded with silence (which the CII in the ‘traditional’ interpretation might know to be tacit consent).

The problem with the CII is similar to the problem with PML-N and Mr Imran Khan: the mainstreaming of regressive ideas and unquestioning deference to it. Its implication in the war of narrative should have been obvious, the CII is on the other side from us in this conflict. However, what have now been muddied are the ‘sides’.

In Pakistan, the TTP have been compared with the IRA (incredibly ignorant comparison), the Tamil Tigers and the Maoists in India, while we are at it, even the LRA. Here is why the confusion on the ‘sides’ matters. In all the above conflicts (which are completely distinct from one another in most fundamental respects and some causes infinitely more defensible than others), to generalise, it is ‘them’ versus the ‘State’. The ideology of the State and the militant group are not aligned in most cases and are in direct collision. So, while there can and will be bloodshed in these scenarios, the overwhelming probability is that the State will exist, battered, weakened and perhaps broken up, yet still there. The State runs little risk of being taken over completely. The State will exist, since the promises made by the State to the ‘people’ (vaguely a majority of the population) are fundamentally different from what the rebels offer or demand. In our case, that was almost never true, starting from the Objectives Resolution, to the Islamisation of the Constitution, the Shariat Bill, the Federal Shariat Court and now, the CII, the promise of the State is to offer exactly what the militant group offers, certainly in a somewhat different form, yet at the elementary level: the same product. Of course, to trivialise it with a business analogy, the Pakistani State and the militant group offer to us the same product (spoilt for choices, are we not?) and the quibbling is on the quality, and of course, efforts to capture, an already quite ‘captive’ market share. Negotiations and Pervez Khattak’s proposals for offices are attempts at a merger, or with ‘miraculous’ new foreign reserves, perhaps a plan for an acquisition. The core remains the same.

The truly disturbing thing is that it does not really matter what side the CII is on. There is only one side now. Hence, with the latest CII issue, seemingly ordinary (one might go so far as almost saying ‘reasonable’) people agree with the CII, or are ambivalent, or would ideally want to change the subject. To demand the disbanding of the CII or in the interim, at least have women members, does not seem practical. Yet, it has to be done, if for nothing else than only for that it is the right thing to do, and for the record to show.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 16^th, 2014.

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