Emptiness of the loss

Raj Mehta

Jan 22 2015 

Cynical Pakistan watchers will undoubtedly respond to the cataclysmic attack in Peshawar in which most of the 134 Army Public School children butchered by nine Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan gunmen were the progeny of military personnel with “serves them right” certitude; even a sense of déjà vu. While this view has some merit, a larger issue stands unaddressed: The emptiness of loss that is universal and the axiomatic inheritance of a flawed ideological construct.

Watching the recent, poignant BBC reportage of the Peshawar shooting, I was grieved by the sense of irretrievable loss of a young Pakistani mother as she recounted in mind-numbing, dignified words the chill morning of 16 December 2014 when she learnt that her 14-year-old son had been shot dead at school. Through muted tears, she recalled that her son's body was grievously lacerated yet, on his innocent face, she felt she saw the trace of a smile, almost as if he had cocked a snook at death. You thought you saw her quiet pride in the way in which her son had faced death. Peshawar, the legendary city of flowers, lost many flowers that day before they could bloom — her brave son among them.

She told her empathetic lady interlocutor that she somehow steeled herself to go and sit on her son's school desk to sense his presence again. With gathering determination and resolve she ended by stating, ‘I am not afraid...I will keep going back...I don’t want the school to close, but instead to bloom. 

Whether in the horrendous Beslen School massacre by Chechen terrorists, the Nigerian Boko Haram kidnappings/killings or the Peshawar Armageddon, emptiness of loss is invariably handled with linear mindsets. The Peshawar school reopened on 11 January 2015 after an understandably extended break, with Army Chief Raheel Sharif and wife present at the gate to boost the traumatised students' morale. A dozen soldiers now protect the school with cameras in place, boundary walls raised and airport-like barricaded entry gates. Pakistan has hanged another seven death-row terrorists even as Zarb-e-Azb, the Army's North Waziristan offensive against the TTP, continues its bloody progress. 

Perceptive observers would however opine that these are short-term measures that skirt the real issue: making fundamental changes in societal outlook and state policy. One analyst who's got it right is terror coverage and Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times (NYT) veteran correspondent/ Associate Editor Nicholas Kristof. Encouraging the young to write poetry in his popular NYT Blog, he quotes young Angel Butts who hears the ‘anguish of a Mother twice destroyed, once by man then by country…’ Remaining silent, Angel reasons, has become more frightening than the raising of her voice…

It's clear that the solution Pakistani society and state seek isn't about taking revenge against the TTP or improving control-of-access in Institutions but a realisation that the real war is between two ideologies; Education that enlightens and Fundamentalism that subsumes darkness. Transformation will not come about by linear removal of security fault-lines. It will come about when Pakistani society decides that enough is enough. Simultaneously, while drones and missiles might serve to neutralize terrorists, the Pakistani state must realise that the numbing emptiness of loss such as had occurred at APS Peshawar urgently demands the surgical removal of Pakistan’s terror apparatus as an instrument of state policy.