Pakistan: Punjab’s apathy

UMAIR JAVED

AS Mama Qadeer and his companions concluded their record-breaking, 2,500-kilometre long journey from Quetta to Islamabad, a gentleman in Lahore did some record breaking of his own by smashing 163 walnuts with his head.

As the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) activists walked through the Paris of Pakistan — a city of nearly nine million — 50-odd progressive activists greeted them, while close to 50,000 students gathered to form a human flag in a nearby stadium.

The apathy of Punjab’s intelligentsia and its urban dwellers to concerns beyond their immediate surroundings has remained a thorny issue for activists and political parties from the smaller provinces. The conflict in Balochistan, for example, has been actively digested as a ‘spontaneous’ fight between the military and a host of foreign-funded tribal chiefs — a relatively simple binary in the average Punjabi mind.

In rare instances when this caricatured view is so overtly called into question, as in the case of this long march, most choose to exercise passive indifference, perhaps wary of the cognitive dissonance a deeper engagement might induce. In any case, Balochistan, or for that matter any of the other provinces, have remained sufficiently unpacked in the Punjabi imagination. Beyond Attock and Multan lie barbaric mountain-dwellers, oppressive feudals, or anti-Pakistan tribal overlords.

At a stage when Pakistan’s fragile democracy and federal character is still being shaped, the question of pervasive indifference, insularity, and lazy caricaturing on part of the most powerful and politically dominant ethnic group becomes even more important. Why does Punjab — or to be precise, north and central Punjab — view itself so uncritically, and its surroundings with a distant, and mostly unflattering lens?

The answer, for the most part, lies with the region’s understanding of its own privilege, and its largely homogenous population. With regards to the first, there are a few facts that need to be laid out quite clearly. Punjab remains prosperous, its economy is dynamic, local state service delivery is less prone to failure, and its population enjoys a considerably better standard of living compared to other regions of the country. That much is widely acknowledged and celebrated within the province. What is almost never acknowledged though is that through no endeavour or enterprise of its own, Punjab remains the beneficiary of a river system that ensures this comparative prosperity compared to other parts of the country.

Secondly, and again through no major achievement of the native population, the British — a foreign ruling entity — decided to gift the province with abundant state employment through the military, and one of the most advanced irrigation and communication networks in the region. On the back of this inheritance, generations can grow and have grown up, without having to move mountains for the sake of upward mobility and a better life. There is little doubt that the prosperity cherished today has its roots in Punjab’s colonial experience; that the trends of elite-patronage established then have continued unabated under successive post-independence regimes; and that while many Punjabis are enterprising and successful, their fortune stands on the shoulders of a favourable history.

This realisation, however, eludes most, and Punjab’s comparative wealth is eventually seen as an outcome of its population’s inherent superiority. The second factor shaping this apathy is the province’s homogenous makeup. Even partition, for all the violence and upheaval it caused, left few long-term scars primarily because the resettled population was from the same ethnic stock, and was given plenty to rebuild their lives with. Subsequently, the idea of mobility in the province has progressed from urban migration to foreign migration, without ever pausing on inter-provincial movement — as it has in other parts of the country. Extended families remain accessible within a few hours, and marriage choices rarely cross ethnic boundaries. In short, one can spend an entire lifetime in the province, in the best schools, colleges, and workplaces, without having to encounter an unfamiliar setting, language, or individual.

In the absence of prolonged, non-transactional interactions with other groups, a large section of Punjabis inform themselves of events elsewhere using base level tropes and caricatures. So violence in Fata or KP is somehow ‘essential’ to the Pakhtun. Karachi is a mess because that’s just how the MQM is. The Baloch and Sindhis are impoverished because the sardars/waderas perpetuate underdevelopment, and the people are too lazy to rebel. This suffocating marriage between an uncritical appraisal of historical privilege, and a largely homogenous existence, has cultivated a decidedly non-federal societal culture. Tragic as that is, it wouldn’t have been half as damaging had Punjab’s political imprint not been as overwhelming as it is.

The government — currently manned by the province’s political elite — has exhibited some of the same apathy through its attempts to sidestep the issue of Islamic militancy and radicalisation within Punjab — a fact that can only be seen as being indicative of a deep-seated, and largely expedient, desire to keep their home turf conflict-free.

More often than not, when other ethnic groups and progressive activists raise accusations of apathy and insularity, the intelligentsia and the politically active middle class chalk them down to ‘an unhealthy fashion of Punjab-bashing’ or mere envy at Punjab’s success and comparative peacefulness.

What they fail to see is that whether these accusations are empirically just or not is irrelevant. What ultimately matters is that inter-provincial mistrust and resentment of Punjab’s insularity is pervasive, is extremely tangible, and continues to pose the biggest obstacle in constructing progressive politics and a functioning federal arrangement in the country.