Darkness risen

Mostly, things are as they were before the Peshawar massacre, there is little sign of that changing in the coming year

A week after the butchery at the Army Public School in Peshawar the media would have us believe that the country was still consumed by grief, wracked by paroxysms of angst and determined that things really really will be different in the future. Mostly, that is a misleading picture. There are brave people who protest outside Lal Masjid and elsewhere, but they are tiny spots in the darkness that has now risen. Mostly, things are as they were before the Peshawar massacre, and there is little sign of that changing in the coming year.

Looking back 12 months, it is possible to see a linear progression, a bloody line that stretches back through a succession of bomb blasts, suicide attacks, craven governance and an ever-ascendant mindset of extremism that now overlays all of us. The life of every man, woman and child in Pakistan is now touched by the darkness, no matter how insulated they may think they are from it. No member of any religious minority may consider themselves safe. No woman is safe anywhere, be it in her own home or going about her innocent business buying for the daily meal. No journalist is safe. No schoolchild is safe. The entire population lives with the possibility of being collateral damage, the accidental casualties of whichever war happens to pass their doorstep on that day.

There have of course been bright spots — the Nobel Peace Prize for Malala Yousufzai — which was tainted in her home country by the vile haters — but they are few and far between and by no means recognised as bright spots by one and all. What brightness there may have been politically rapidly faded to anodyne grey, diluted by egotism and bombast eventually to be snuffed out by the Peshawar outrage.

Month after month, polio vaccinators laid down their lives for a better Pakistan. Children died in their hundreds in the Thar drought. Rape… particularly of children, I noticed… was regularly reported. ‘Honour’ murders rarely warranted a headline.

Such ‘outrage’ as there is quickly dissipates. A Christian couple, the wife pregnant, were tortured by a mob and then burned alive, all in front of their children. And all on an unproven allegation of blasphemy. Yet where is the outrage today? Long gone. There have been arrests, but nobody expects there to be a successful prosecution arising from what by even local standards was a horrific incident.

The outrage that followed the Peshawar attack was undeniably real. There was nothing fake or contrived about it and for perhaps two days, three at most, it was possible to discern a collective shock, a sense of horror. Instructions were issued at the school of my own daughter on the morning following the attack as to what to do if the Taliban came through the gates shooting from the hip. She came home frightened, asking if these men were going to kill her. We reassured her, at the same time knowing that yes, those bad men may try and murder our child.

The time is past when the darkness could be held back, long past. Pakistan goes into the New Year in the middle of a bout of judicial executions that will stoke further hatreds, fuel more violence. Those who dare to stand against the Taliban get threatening calls on their mobile phones — they have your number. They will have your head if they so choose.

And yet a flame burns. A new college for deaf people opened this year. Tens of thousands of children benefited from an internationally funded education programme. An NGO in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa that I have supported for years expanded its health services, and the schools for children of brick-kiln workers go from strength to strength. There were successful literary festivals in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad attended by thousands.

And yet a flame burns… our small flame. In the corner of the library and music room there is a Christmas tree, festooned with lights and hung with sparkly stars. A Nativity scene is on a glass-topped table and candles made by a dear friend scent the air in the evenings. On the morning this appears in print we will be opening gifts, the darkness, for now, beyond our walls.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 25^th,  2014.

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