The Qandeel Baloch murder

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

A young woman was murdered by her brother because he did not like her Facebook posts. If we find it possible to qualify our horror at a murder so foul, it is time to put away our own Facebook posts for a little while and take stock of our own values.

Many have been jolted by the reaction of even highly educated, urbane, liberal Pakistanis, who will not hesitate to state that Qandeel Baloch’s murder was a crime, but who will construct a number of seemingly reasonable arguments that qualify the crime itself. “She was spreading oraaneeat, and fahashat”. “She was so beyhooda”. “She brought it upon herself”. And perhaps the worst of all, “She deserved it”.

There are two things about this reaction that we must try to understand. The first is that mealy-mouthed condemnations and whataboutery are a staple of Pakistani culture. These are the wages of a national discourse deliberately constructed to differentiate between good bad guys and bad bad guys, between good religious intolerance (Ahmadis), and bad religious intolerance (Christians), between harmless mehndi dancing by English-medium elites at the Marriot and PC, and late night mujras by Punjabi-medium courtesans in hotel rooms, before and after the mehndis. Whataboutery is the national lubricant we use to make slippery moral slopes more comfortable than they would be upon serious and sober reflection.

The second is that anyone surprised by the diverse reactions to the Qandeel Baloch murder has to be ensconced firmly inside a high-security cocoon, alienated from and oblivious to the social, ethical and political realities that shape national culture here. Evidence of misogyny, moral relativism and elitism is so prevalent that one cannot breathe without ingesting the toxicity of the particulate matter enabling such reactions. However, the most powerful enabler of the vileness of reactions to the Qandeel Baloch murder is the thoughtlessness and impunity with which young educated people in this country, particularly in its cities, can talk about death.

Not so long ago, attending funerals was a key rite of passage for a young man. In our early teens, many forty-something Pakistani urban men used to participate by helping carry the coffin. Both within Muslim tradition, and within the broad amalgam of linguistic and tribal cultures in Pakistan, ‘kandha deyna’ is an important part of growing into one’s community. Coffins are heavy. Lowering a dead body into a grave is heavy. Bathing a dead person’s body is heavy. Muslims have a religious obligation to participate in these events precisely in order to remove the romance, or otherness of death from our consciousness, and to enable an appreciation of life.

Three things have conspired to substantially limit the experience of grave-site engagement with dead bodies for young Pakistanis. The first, with thanks to my friend Umair Javed, is the dramatic decline in mortality over the last generation. Pakistanis living longer means that young Pakistanis bury fewer elders. The second is post-modern urbanisation, which is not only that people move from rural areas (away from their principal communities to new ones), but also that people move away from their original neighbourhoods to new ones). Each move adds another layer between new communities, and lowers the intimacy quotient within both old and new communities.

The third is the nuclearisation of the Pakistani family, as more and more young people move out of the family home, for college and university, to migrate to other cities, to migrate abroad, or to simply build their own homes with new partners and in new neighbourhoods, attending funerals has become less frequent and less prioritised.

If our experience of this taking of human life is shaped largely by television news tickers, or Facebook posts or Twitter timelines, it should not shock us too much that the concept of human life and its sacredness is related to by young people differently than it is by their elders.

Why should we be talking about and thinking about Qandeel Baloch? Principally because in her murder we find the threads of a discussion about class that needs to be addressed urgently by Pakistani public policy. Other threads are easier to discuss, but also easier to forget. Qandeel was not the first female to test the boundaries of what is deemed appropriate sexual behaviour. She will not be the last. She was not the first person to be murdered by a family member for the sake of a man’s sense of ‘honour’. She will not be the last. She was not the first social media-based celebrity. She will not be the last.

Where Qandeel Baloch came from and what she represents in terms of class stature, however, is unique within the specific context of Pakistan today and tomorrow. How self-proclaimed liberals and open-minded English-speaking Pakistanis are repulsed by ‘inappropriately behaved’ women (especially as opposed to how they fawn over ‘inappropriately behaved’ men) has real, operational relevance to how we construct a response to such murders.

If the economy in Pakistan does grow at above five percent per annum over the next several years, tens of millions of Pakistanis will experience a transformation in the quantum of consumption that they are able to experience. ‘Consumption experienced’ will not make its way to any list of social or economic indicators, but it is an integral part of a global post information age consciousness, and it is already driving substantial political upheaval in places like India, the UK, and perhaps even the UK (see Messrs., Modi, Johnson, and Trump).

Traditional measures of economic wellbeing restrict themselves, at best, to baskets of goods consumed. But the experience of being able to consume more brings with it a universe of aspirations or curiosities that many of us, reading an English-language newspaper in a country of 200 million mostly poorly educated and poorly-nutritioned people, take for granted.

At the risk of offending many people, the moral problem that Qandeel Baloch really represents is not that she made lewd videos. Because let’s be honest: many of the people that claim to be disgusted by her videos not only watch those videos sans hesitation, but are also fans of Miley Cyrus, of Justin Beiber, of Sunny Leone, and of Kanye West. Hum karein tou dance, tum karo tou mujra?

The problem that Qandeel Baloch represents is that she comes from a place where the English accent isn’t quite Karachi Grammar enough, that the twerking isn’t quite Kardashian enough, and dammit, why is that maasi-type trying to play like that?

Qandeel Baloch challenged and will continue to challenge our linear conception of who can wear slutty clothes and who cannot, or who can twerk and who cannot. There is a small minority in the discourse that is genuinely ideologically driven to ensure that no one can – ever. But those folks are marginal.

Within the depths of this class-based dynamic is ensconced a deep-set misogyny that draws on both religiosity and the lure of ‘tradition’ to tie women to notions of appropriateness that, regardless of what they actually are, are set to be challenged in much wilder and more powerful ways than we’ve seen yet. This is the one true promise of technology and economic growth.

The great Serbian Communist Milovan Djilas wrote in 1965 about how a new class emerges and what informs it, predicting that “every substantive change in the social relationship between those who monopolise administration, and those who work, is inevitably reflected in the ownership relationship”.

For almost two decades, technology and economic growth (though in spurts) has fuelled transformative changes in the economic and social capacities of women in Pakistan. The ownership relationship is changing. All the time. Not all of the changes will be welcomed by everybody. One of the central challenges for public policy in Pakistan is to construct ways in which these changes can be synthesised seamlessly into national life to the betterment of everybody in general, and women in particular.

If the reactions to Qandeel Baloch’s murder are anything to go by, public policy is nowhere near ready for what has already arrived. For better or worse: more is coming. It can and should be for better. But it won’t happen automatically.