Jiye Malala!

Editorial By Najam Sethi

Soon after 14-year old Swati activist Malala Yusufzai was rushed to hospital earlier this week with a life-threatening bullet in her skull, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan proudly claimed responsibility for the attempt on her life. The next day, when doctors declared that Malala had miraculously survived the attack, and when the world's media began to buzz with the good news, the TTP released another statement: they would target her again because she was a "secular-minded" person who was spreading discord. Imagine the paranoid, illiterate mind set -- a child of 14 spreading discord! The Taliban also quoted chapter and verse from the Quran to try and justify their barbarity, but mercifully, many religious scholars disagreed with their interpretations. Malala's crime was to defy the Taliban's ban on girls' schooling and to write a diary of the siege of Swat for the BBC. Her friendly cooperation with the world's media; her bright, smiling interviews and her beaming confidence, were a threat to the Pakistani Taliban and the way of life they propose, a peculiar conception of "sharia" that can only exist in an atmosphere of total repression, and in total isolation from the rest of the world. A charismatic young girl like Malala, who unabashedly embraces what the world has to offer, embodies the kind of internal resistance, what the Taliban in their paranoia call "fitna" or discord, that inspires confidence in her fellows and always poses the greatest challenge to a fear-mongering regime. So the TTP's response to Malala's miracle recovery, though revolting in the extreme, is perfectly understandable. What doesn't make sense is the head-in-the-sand attitude of Pakistan's decomposing state and society. Every national leader, including the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani recorded a statement of outrage at the attack on Malala Yusufzai. President Zardari, Mian Nawaz Sharif, Asfandyar Wali Khan and Altaf Hussain all slammed the cowardly assault on young Malala. Imran Khan and his Tehrik-e-Insaf leaders followed suit when they saw the wave of revulsion that swept the entire country but once again, Khan managed to obfuscate the issue by hopping on to his favourite hobby horse, the CIA's drone attacks in Waziristan. But just how many of our leaders have had the stomach to identify the Tehrik-e-Taliban by name, even though the spokesman of the TTP proudly claims responsibility, and to call for a cohesive national policy to defeat them? Very few, and they are mostly from the Awami National Party that has suffered most from the Taliban's bombing sprees and targeted violence. Other leaders' vague expressions such as "inhuman", "barbaric" or "animal" for the attackers, always followed by the remark that such people "cannot be Muslims", may allow Pakistan's spineless power elites to temporarily save their own skins. But it only adds to the general confusion of ordinary Pakistanis, who are already conditioned by their textbooks, Friday khutbas, TV anchors and the state's deliberately opaque policies towards extremists, to try to deduce from such dark innuendo which "foreign hand" has dealt their country the latest blow. Nor, indeed, does it make sense to equate the attack on Malala Yusufzai with American drone attacks in Waziristan. First of all, Malala is not an operator of American drones. Secondly, the fact of girls' schooling, a universal human right acknowledged even by the most repressive "Islamist" governments, and the Taliban's established opposition to it, has nothing to do with America or its drones. And finally, courageous young women like Malala Yusufzai are targeted in large part because they challenge an anciently patriarchal society, a society that has resisted social reform at every stage and now has few ways of dealing with its politically aware, technology savvy, independent-minded young people other than violence. To suggest that Malala Yusufzai was shot in the head because America is raining drones on Waziristan is not just lazy deduction, it is a disingenuous, even dangerous deflection from the real issue, implying that Pakistani girls can't be schooled until American drones are stopped. This is not, of course, to deny the steady brutalization of Pakistani society, a brutalization in which the Taliban and American-operated (and Pakistan-approved) drones are but the latest developments. The "case" of Malala Yusufzai, as it will now be called, exposes several failures of the Pakistani state: the failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens; the failure to overhaul the repressive colonial systems of "governance" that have bred nothing but banditry and warlordism in much of Pakistan's north and west; and the state's failure even to acknowledge, let alone fight, the menace of religious fanaticism, which is claiming its best and brightest one by one. Alas, this is the legacy of a state that has never resolved the contradiction between its "secular" and "practical" aspirations and its cynical deployments of orthodox religion. And so it has come to the point where, for Pakistani politicians, army chiefs and media personalities, to even name the attackers of a 14-year old girl is to touch a nerve, to step on toes, to risk your credibility and even your life. It is our good fortune that Malala Yusufzai lives. But who will take her, and all those Pakistani girls inspired by her, back to school?