Our children of a lesser God

When the story broke and made the pages of national newspapers, and when the electronic media picked it up and it quickly snowballed into one of the most shocking exposes of human and child rights abuse in Pakistan, the victims’ numbers began to steadily swell.
It was not just Hussain Khanwala near Kasur, we learned, that had singularly borne the tragedy and silently witnessed the horror exacted for over nine years by an organised child porn ring. That sickness had metastasized equally to other towns in the entire vicinity of Hussain Khanwala.
From Rajiwala, Elowala, Bazeedpur, Kharapar, Choriwala, Nooriwala, Bhadian Usman, Ratnaiwala, Rangaywala, Bhagay, Jora, Nathaywala, and Mahalam, the weak, the dispossessed, the wounded and the violated gathered their wits and broke their decade’s long silence, marching into the centre of Hussain Khanwala and demanding the justice they had hitherto been systematically denied. For even as the wheels of the state’s propaganda machinery began their cunning yet lethargic revolutions to counter and subvert the truth of the matter, it became abundantly clear that the fifteen or so accused could not have been the masterminds of the rampant evil – rape, sodomy, torture, blackmail and extortion – that had taken control of Kasur district.
It is always about power and its corrupting influence. It is always about the licence that one acquires when the institutions of the state are willingly complicit in enabling the collapse of law and order and justice, and with it the death of compassion, humanity and civilisation. Where were the police officials of each of these townships when the satanic exploitation of the wretched began and endured for a decade? Where were the political representatives of these towns? What happened to the complaints that were lodged with the Hussain Khanwala police station and were eventually expunged from record, the victim’s families forced into a shameful compromise?
Why did the medical doctors (if there are any in any of the towns and villages mentioned), the local hakims and healers, or whoever out of the local populace learned of the physical pain and suffering of the young children, of the extortion and blackmail of their families, choose to remain silent? What power and fear did the real culprits who are still lurking in the shadows – and whose identities will probably remain shrouded in mystery – exercise over the victims’ families? That they had access and sway over court officials in Lahore speaks volumes of their political and economic clout.
Even as we grapple with these questions, the state has issued familiar responses, engaging in its time-tested ploys to delay requisite action: denials issued side by side with requests for judicial commissions (mercifully turned down by the Lahore High Court); hollow threats of punishment for the perpetrators, hand in hand with spins on the tragedy, trying to relegate it to the pettiness of a land dispute. No ministers or MNAs, as yet, have deemed it worth the risk to their security, or the detriment to their valuable time, to visit the area and condole with the families.
Fifteen were accused, five out them have already been granted bail; official quarters are strategically manipulating public understanding by circulating bizarre justifications in the print media, which are really attempts at denying the victims’ right to justice through counter-accusations of guilt, owing to the victims’ own participation in the loathsome acts; and by creating dissonance through deceitful statements, which dispute the actual number of videos or attempt to sweep the fact of the crime under the rug, by stating that it was an incident of the past.
When a school is attacked by terrorists and the state develops and implements a counterterrorism strategy it must understand that killing terrorists and apprehending them is only a first step in a solution that more importantly must target the roots and origins of terrorism: madressahs harbouring militant sectarian factions, splinter terrorist groups, organisations and individuals protecting the agents of hate all need to be dismantled for any meaningful peace and stability to endure. Similarly Kasur has laid bare the difficult to swallow reality of a locale whose social, political and moral fabric has been ruptured. To mend it will require an overhaul of the police, the judiciary, educational institutions, local politics and local economics et al.
Imprisonment of the fifteen accused, even capital punishment for each, will be grossly insufficient. The key focus of all positive measures must be the local education system. There are no real schools or a school system in Hussain Khanwala or in any one of its neighbouring towns and villages – or indeed across the rural backwaters of Pakistan. There may be buildings that masquerade as places of learning, wanting in the provision of a rational curricula and devoid of any men and women of any knowledge or moral standing, who in Kasur’s case, may have acted as the guardians of those innocent raped and tortured girls and boys.
Take each one of them and hand them a monkey instead, and for the same wages the state pays them today, they will gladly perform a circus act in front of those very school buildings. The state’s education system is outmoded, defunct and incapable of producing any boys and girls fit for undergraduate or graduate level study, and hence incapable of securing their rights or ensuring any modern or progressive future for our country. This is the evil that has festered for 68 years under our noses; this is the evil that will be our final undoing.
Finally, dear reader, consider these names again: Rajiwala, Elowala, Bazeedpur, Kharapar, Choriwala, Nooriwala, Bhadian Usman, Ratnaiwala, Rangaywala, Bhagay, Jora, Nathaywala, Mahalam and Hussain Khanwala. What do they mean and sound to us? Did they ever figure in our consciousness till today? Will the scores of other invisible, unheard of chalets and mouzas and shanty towns across Pakistan ever concern us? Will the muffled cries of anguish of their mistreated, abused men, women and children ever gain the pitch and timber to make the national airwaves? Or hold our attention unless they have suffered from heinous crime that lands them fortuitously in our line of sight? Will they – do they – amount to any significance on the map of the civilised world?
When you observe the soap suds and dirty water disappearing down the shower drain you don’t pause to imagine the lightless colourless world of sewer drains and septic tanks that swallows it all up. You are simply content that it does so – that indescribable netherworld of muck and filth and perpetual dark, and the neat system that transports your dirt and grime to it. Pakistan today is turning into just such a netherworld, one that the powers that be continually shrug away their concern for.
Let’s hope the tragedy of Kasur passes by our consciousness quickly into the sewage drain of time. One thing is for sure: with APS Peshawar first, and now Kasur, all our chest-thumping and flag-waving and patriotic singing planned for this Independence Day will be in bad taste, an affront to the memory of each of the victims of these horrible crimes.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Email: kmushir@hotmail.com
Twitter: @kmushir