No country for children

Pakistan stands at the crossroads. Whether to take the road hitherto unknown, or to remain steadfast on the one it has trudged along since that fateful August day in 1947. The policies the various governments have implemented — or at least gave the pretence to — have resulted in a potpourri otherwise known as a system of governance. The situation in February 2015 is so abysmal, it will require a starkly honest introspection to decipher how so much went so wrong, and so consistently in a country that lacked nothing in resources — human, mental, intellectual and natural. Writing about the dismal situation may be the norm now, but for Pakistan-loving Pakistanis like me, it’s no less than a dissection of something that’s very personal to me, like my own family. Writing about children feels that way.

I see children being targeted and killed here. As Pakistan continues its mourning of the Peshawar killings — 133 children — a suicide-bomb attack kills 61 in a Shia imambargah in Shikarpur. Many children died when a bomb ripped through the congregation of devotees on an ordinary day, splattering their tiny limbs on one another, making some of the bodies unrecognisable. One mother lost four of her children. In Tharparkar, countless have died due to malnourishment in an ongoing man-made famine. Many newborns have died in hospitals in Sargodha, and other parts of Pakistan because of the unavailability of basic post-natal care. Innumerable are those who fall prey to preventable diseases like measles, and while many survive without polio vaccination, polio disables a few every year. A seven-year-old was found hanging in a room in a mosque after being sodomised and killed. A 12-year-old girl died after suffering physical abuse from her employers for allegedly burning clothes. There are many like him and her whose fates go unnoticed.

There are more than 25 million out-of-school children, according to an Alif Ailaan report. This is almost half the number of children in Pakistan. An unquantifiable number of children attend madrassas (where the curriculum consists of mainly of scripture-reading and Islamic studies) and state-run schools (where the substandard quality of education disables students to deal with the challenges of growing pressure on excellence in mathematics, science and English in a diminishing job market). The nexus of madrassa and militancy is maximised as future opportunities for children from low-income backgrounds are limited, or one-dimensional.

In the absence of activities that enhance mental, intellectual and interpersonal capabilities, and lack of reinforcing the importance of traits of healthy competition, team spirit and sportsmanship, many children in Pakistan grow up in a regimented and regressive environment. That in turn enables and perpetuates a line of thinking that is rigid, bigoted, and in certain cases, extremist, conditioned to formulate hate narratives on the basis of differences of faith, ethnicity, ideology or nation. With almost non-existent access to sporting and other extracurricular activities in madrassas and government-run schools and colleges, the cumulative energy finds its release in the formation of groups that control their alma maters on the force of their narrative of fear and exploitation. The shelf-life of such activities may be limited or end in a fatal manner, but the arrogance of power propped up by the distortion of religion becomes an influence greater than the lure of lowly government jobs or nondescript ones in the private sector.

As large swathes of Pakistan remain engulfed in the bleakness of load-shedding, shortage of water and gas, quality healthcare and schooling, as well as inaccessibility to justice and a fear for life, children and teenagers growing up in that dark Pakistan wondering when things would change for them. Weaving their way through obscure, narrow alleys, reeking of overflowing sewers, they make their way to schools or madrassas where they learn little that would help them later; or to workplaces where they learn how to slog like a machine on remuneration that helps little while fortifying the mind against the blatant social inequality.

It’s not rocket science. It’s the 101 of any system. If not taken care of, children grow, but like weeds, like redundant parts of a society. And those redundant parts fit into an unwieldy whole that is unproductive, incapacitated, bitter, vegetative, dysfunctional, and in some cases, dangerous. The neglected children grow into adults who are invisible, misfits or pariahs.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 6^th, 2015.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.