In the allegorical novel on modern India, Midnight’s Children, the narrator, Saleem Sinai, can telepathically communicate with the 1001 other children that were born on the stroke of midnight that marked Indian independence from colonial Britain. Shiva, his nemesis and alter-ego with whom he was switched at birth, is his enemy but also a decorated war hero who has progressed from a poor gang-leader to a major in the Indian army. A commentary on the fractured identities of post-partition Indo-Pakistan, Midnight’s Children is also about interrupted heroism.

Saleem, the accidental Muslim, has been the usurper of Shiva’s birthright but is not quite the villain. Rather, he is the anti-hero. Different from the evil villain, the anti-hero is the lesser hero who seeks to maximise his fate, his own destiny. Saleem returns to India from Pakistan -- a country where the hero is always at risk of losing his identity and where he is stripped of memory and his magical instinct of telepathy.

Over the course of the novel, Saleem becomes the iconic victim of failed secular national ideals and the embodiment of a sterilised and impotent body politic. Meanwhile, Shiva, who has battled to retrieve his legitimate place in middle-class Indian society, represents the dangers of hyper nationalist Hinduism. With his violent, masculinist virility, he litters the country with thousands of offsprings but doesn’t seem to offer the alternative heroism that Indo-Pak readers may be looking for.

Haunted by unresolved issues of identity politics, it seems that even after 1947 and 1971, Pakistan’s continuous internal fractures will not allow us to imagine a common notion of national heroism even today. 

The search for heroes has plagued post-colonial Pakistan. We continue to look for rescue in the form of divine laws, military interventions, external financial aid or a combination of all three. The inherent contradictions of these sources have only delivered failure. A theocratic state has not delivered anything more than an aggressive and formal delegitimisation and exclusion of minorities and other sects, and encouraged the flourishing of Islamist garrisons and jihadi contractors.

Military interference has interrupted democratic progress and financial dependence has encouraged an apathy that has resulted in cowardly economics and an inequality of a brutal order. However, despite the repeated failure of the role of religion, the army, and capitalist economics in Pakistan, these remain the defining crucibles of our nationalism and heroism.

Commonly, the ultimate hero is one who sacrifices his life in altruism but in Pakistan, the motivation will decide if one is worthy of being recognised as a hero or not. This motive has to be in defense of the theocratic nation-state and, therefore, a Pakistani martyr can only be a Muslim or one who represents or is pursuing the cause of the religious state. Further, the hierarchy of heroism in Pakistan is such that, living heroes are not valued as much as the dead. Instead, to qualify as shaheed, one must literally witness death, as shahadat is the highest honour in the hierarchy of heroism.

This then explains the maniacal hate for a school girl who defied the militants who were bombing schools and attempted to murder her. She escaped martyrdom rather than submitting to it and continued to live and pursue the secular cause of lay education. For this reason, her haters applaud and pour tributes on the bravery of the boy, Aitezaz Hasan, who sacrificed his life, not for some larger-than-life cause of education but due to the noble thought of saving the lives of his peers.

Malala was the reluctant hero with a survival instinct that enabled her to grow to heroic status. Aitezaz was a proactive hero who followed his instinct to embrace sacrifice in the tradition of a classical Greek tragic hero. Both children, both Pakistani, yet the one that survived was maybe too secular and was thrust into a far more enviable position. Admiration is more forthcoming for a dead hero rather than one committed with a purposeful mission.

This, perhaps, explains the reluctance to applaud Hakimullah Mehsud or Bin Laden openly during their murderous pursuit to punish the profane, Islamic Republic of Pakistan. But the hidden admiration surfaced after their deaths, in the gushing recognition of their ‘shahadat’, which was not dependent on their ‘accomplishment’, ideology or cause but rather, was defined by who their killers were.

Pakistanis are also worthy of shahadat if killed by a non-Muslim or lesser Muslim, regardless of their own value or contribution as either Muslim or Pakistani citizen. Which also explains the drive to strip ‘lesser Muslims’, such as Dr Abdus Salam of his iconic right as Pakistani hero. As a corollary, it also explains why victims of drones derive more sympathy than the equally anonymous victims of militant plunder and murder.

Class too, plays an important role in spiritual heroism. The higher one’s social class and office, the higher the status of martyrdom. So, despite the fact that several public officials have been assassinated in the name of religion, it is due to her office, class, and symbolic worth that Benazir Bhutto is a more heroic shaheed than Governor Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti. Taseer was pursuing the unworthy cause of a minority woman but Bhatti was murdered for being a lesser Pakistani because he was not Muslim. In truth, the worth of their sacrifice in death is exactly equal.

The ANP members who were systematically eliminated during elections 2013: the targeted tribal elders holding peace jirgas, Shamshad begum of the Kurram Levis in Hangu, Abdul Waheed of Orangi Pilot Project, and the girls’ schools and polio clinic, and lady health workers of Swat, were all penalised for resisting and defying the militants.

Ordinarily, when such representatives of the state and national campaigns are targeted, it counts as an act of treason but when Taseer was murdered, he was betrayed not just by his guard but a second time by the government and state who disowned him.

Meanwhile, Taseer’s murderer and cause of social disorder was hailed as a ghazi -- the ultimate Muslim-Pakistani hero. This was symbolic of the perversion of heroism where ghazis no longer protect the state but, instead, turn their guns inwards to kill perceived and unarmed, defenseless, internal enemies.

It was only a matter of time before the redefinition of the Pakistan-attacking Taliban as true shaheeds by Jamaat e Islami’s Ameer, in comparison to the spurious shaheeds of the Pakistan army. The maulvi of the Governor House who refused to perform the burial rites for Taseer should have been tried for treason but these betrayers of the Pakistani nation are seen as true heroes of a supra but abstract, imagined religious order where the law is equally imagined.

Afia Siddiqi was a victim of American injustice and that makes her an icon of Muslim suffering and heroism. But the unfairness meted out to the Christian Pakistani, Asia Bibi, does not permit her to claim status as icon or hero for the Jamaat e Islami and conservatives. The Pakistani jails that are full of men and women falsely accused of blasphemy and who are victims of the caprices of the justice system are mainly lower classes and, therefore, cast into the dustbin of heroic suffering.

Shabana, ‘dancing girl’ of Swat who was hung in Khooni Chawk was not viewed as a tragic resistance hero because she was a prostitute but the suicide of Fakhra, the victim of acid throwing, caused liberal outrage because unlike dancing girls, she was redeemable.

Necessarily, the Darwinist principle of survival of the fittest is anathema to the religious notion of fate that decides life and death. Therefore, death qualifies one to a higher status of heroism. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem predicts that his end will be a crumbling into "six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous and necessarily oblivious dust" and may be read as a metaphor of the fractured and dismembered post-colonial nation.

It seems that in Pakistan, heroism is also destined to be memorialised not by how many lives one saves or improves but rather, on a competitive scale of how many lives we sacrifice for anonymous, abstract causes, such as patriotism and spiritual rewards.