The mayor of Lahore

Side-effect

The writer is a poet and author basedin Islamabad.

It is but natural to feel happy when you see a woman or a man who shares your origin, whether currently s/he is a citizen of your country or not, becoming successful in any field of human endeavour anywhere in the world. You will be even more delighted if s/he makes it to an elected political position.

Being elected is hugely significant because it demonstrates the trust of so many others in your ability and potential. It is not a simple feat to get hundreds of thousands of votes from people who are not known to you personally. Therefore, Pakistanis feeling elated on Sadiq Khan becoming the mayor of the city of London – one of the most important cities in the world in all respects – is both natural and understandable.

However, what I find ironic is that many of those jumping with joy in Pakistan while celebrating Khan’s win in London will not, for a single moment, lament the gruesome fact that something similar can never happen in Pakistan in the foreseeable future.

Sadiq Khan was born to a working class family, his father being a bus driver and mother a seamstress. Of course, working people in the UK are much better off than the working people in Khan’s ancestral country. That must have been the reason his parents left Karachi sometime around 1970 and settled down in London. But they remained a part of the lower echelons of British society in terms of their access to riches when Khan and his siblings were growing up.

However, the British welfare state and Sadiq Khan’s personal merit both helped make him a successful lawyer and popular politician. He has climbed up the economic ladder over the years but certainly comes from a working-class background and is a South Asian Muslim meaning that he belongs to both an ethnic and religious minority in the UK. He is neither from a Christian denomination nor of a European or White Caucasian origin.

Let us look at the working class and the downtrodden in Pakistan. They had little chance at the time when Sadiq was born and they have little chance for changing their fate even now. Exceptions are there to prove the rule, although few and far between.

The son of a peasant remains a peasant, the daughter of domestic help will become domestic help, the children of a janitor will start cleaning toilets and mopping floors even before their limbs are fully formed, the son of a bus driver will start as a conductor and then graduate to becoming a driver like his father, and the daughter of a beggar on the street will either continue to be a beggar or turn into a cheaply available commercial sex worker.

I don’t know what Sadiq Khan’s parents did for a living when in Karachi. But if his father had been a rickshaw or bus driver in Karachi or Lahore – an honest, upright man who would earn his living with pride in his hard work – and his wife had been a seamstress, would Sadiq Khan, or any of his siblings, have had a chance to become the mayor of their city?

Even today, the working people of Pakistan, who find it hard to make their ends meet, spend a large part of their income on school fee and related expenses for their children. But the schools they can afford to send their children to, both public and private, offer extremely low quality education. Almost half of the children of school-going age in Pakistan are out of school anyway.

The US, where the basic healthcare programmes are not seen as the responsibility of the state by many, provides free public education for its children. In Pakistan, whatever the rhetoric we hear from powers that be, education is not a priority. Without access to quality education for all, the classist and caste-ist Pakistani society will continue to marginalise its working and lower income classes.

More than him being a Pakistani, many people around me are rejoicing the fact that Sadiq Khan is a Muslim. Well, to an extent, that is natural too. Muslims around the world have been at the receiving end for a long time now due to a combination of reasons, including the desire of the rich Western nations to exploit their resources as well as the imposition of wars on lands where they are in a majority or for their own obscurantism, irrationality, ignorance and disregard for human rights – irrespective of whether they are the majority or minority community.

In this context, when you see a Muslim woman or a man rising to prominence in a largely non-Muslim society you feel like have received some respite from the happenings around you. But then you find those in Pakistan predicting that Muslims will eventually dominate the secular societies of the world as if it is preordained and there has been some divine intervention. What a paradox!

Talented Muslims can come to the top in Britain or other countries in the world where they are in a minority because of the very presence of a secular polity and plural society in these countries. I find it terribly strange that people in Pakistan do not want Donald Trump to win elections in the US but would support a right-wing political party in Pakistan. Or they support Sadiq Khan and Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party when in London but Aleem Khan and Imran Khan of the PTI when in Lahore.

There is an aside here. Imran Khan publicly supported his friend and former brother-in-law Zak Goldsmith in his campaign for mayoral election against Sadiq Khan. Goldsmith went all out to declare his opponent an extremist and a terror sympathiser, to the extent that even his own party comrades objected to the nastiness of his campaign. That furthers the irony for Pakistanis as here is someone claiming to transform Pakistan, a self-proclaimed messiah, supporting a right-wing, conservative candidate in London simply because he is a friend or a relation.

Those Pakistani Muslims who are happy for Sadiq Khan being a Muslim may also think about how a comparable situation in Pakistan would look like. The news about that situation will read: “Inayat Masih, 45, a human rights lawyer who was first elected as MNA from NA 125 beating both Ayaz Sadiq and Imran Khan in 2018, wins the election for the mayor of Lahore in 2020. He will immediately resign his National Assembly seat where a by-election will be held within two months.

“Inayat Masih’s father, Barkat Masih, was a rickshaw driver in Lahore who grew up in Badami Bagh and his mother, Venus Masih, was a seamstress who grew up in Mariamabad, district Sheikhupura. Inayat Masih went to a government boys’ school in Kot Lakhpat, Forman Christian College and Punjab University Law College. He taught law at his alma mater for a few years before receiving a scholarship from the Higher Education Commission for a post-graduate degree from the UK. He came back to Pakistan and practised both corporate and human rights law besides actively pursuing community work and political campaigning.

“Masih has thanked the citizens of Lahore for posing their trust in his person and politics by electing him to the coveted office of the Mayor of Lahore. He says he will continue to serve all communities and turn Lahore into a women-friendly city.”

Will we be ready to elect Inayat Masih on a general seat for the National Assembly in 2018 and then elect him in 2020 as the mayor of the city he grew up in?

Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com