Hating our heroes

She’s a best-selling author, a UN Messenger of Peace, a Nobel Prize winner and global icon for children’s education. But in her home country, Malala Yousafzai’s name cannot be tolerated in a schoolbook’s ‘list of important people’. Even if the Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board’s recent confiscation of a social studies textbook featuring her next to Pakistan’s founding father and other key personalities is said to be solely because of a missing NOC – which many have found to be poor justification for the act – the sad reality is that Malala continues to unnecessarily remain a deeply controversial figure. It’s hard to pinpoint why, exactly, except for perhaps our collective hatred of any Pakistani whose efforts are recognised abroad more than they are at home.

As a young girl living in Swat in 2008, Malala bravely chronicled life under the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan which was bombing schools and had banned girls’ education. Once the army defeated the TTP and life returned to ‘normal’, she became a vocal campaigner of girls’ education and a symbol of local resistance to the TTP, who still lurked in the shadows. In 2012, while on her way to school, the TTP attempted to assassinate her, but she miraculously survived. Having moved to the UK since then, the world continues to hold her in high esteem but back home she is looked at with suspicion of being part of a warped international conspiracy to ‘damage Pakistan’s reputation and promote a Western agenda’. The fact that the TTP owned the attack on her, and that the army came to her rescue and its doctors provided crucial first aid, appears lost on Malala-haters. Instead of owning her and the wonderful work she does for promoting children’s education across the world, the state too shies away from openly owning her. Mysterious forces come into play whenever Malala or her work is being recognised, as was the case during her cancelled book launch in Peshawar in 2014. Instead of trying to erase or muddy her place in history on the day of her 24th birthday this Monday, Pakistanis should have instead celebrated ‘Malala Day’, declared by the UN in a bid to promote free and compulsory education for children across the world.

As for the PCTB, it appears to be in a hurry to impose its will, irrespective of what consequences it may entail for Pakistan nationally and internationally. The PCTB has been serving notices to independent book publishers urging them to apply for fresh NOCs to align their books with the SNC. There are at least two issues here: one, the SNC is highly controversial and the way the government wants to enforce it is anti-democratic. Two, its implementation smacks of authoritarian attitudes prevalent in society and promoted by education managers in the country. The proverbial requirement of an ‘NOC’ at nearly every step of bureaucratic machinery is in any case anachronistic. The people of this country already have to submit photocopies of their CNICs almost on a daily basis for the most basic things. The condition of an NOC for reading and teaching material serves no purpose other than enforcing a single narrative in the country. We have seen how repeated attempts to curb alternative interpretations have rendered our education system devoid of independent thinking.

While Federal Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry deserves credit for questioning the recent action of the PCTB as well as its capabilities of deciding which books to ban in the first place, the state has to once and for all decide who our heroes are and why we treat some of them differently. It is a matter of shame that the only two Nobel Laureates from the country – the first being renowned physicist Dr Abdus Salam – have been disowned by the state and larger society, instead of being celebrated as role models. What do all these individuals – heroes in their own fields – have to do to be accepted by the majority and find their rightful place in the country’s history?