“There is no battle. This is not a war. This is a massacre.”

By Fayes T Kantawala
Fayes T Kantawala joined the mourners outside Governor’s House in Lahore last week

Cry, the beloved country

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Last week in Lahore, a doctor was driving his twelve-year-old boy to school in the morning. Two men on motorcycles intercepted their car and opened fire, killing father and son with multiple gun shot wounds. The victims were Shias. That’s the reason – and the only reason, according to the last update – that they were killed. They were not the first and they will not be the last.

The killing earned the sympathy and outrage of people all over the country, as many “target killings” have before, and I have no doubt that our better emotions will be stirred by such acts in the future. The Shia genocide in this country is widespread, pervasive, unrelenting and very much a work in progress. Even as a schoolchild was being pumped with bullets on a cool Monday morning in Lahore, dozens of Hazara families were staging a protest in the sub-zero temperatures of Quetta with more than 80 corpses to illustrate the point. All over Pakistan Shias have been murdered in groups, by themselves, in cars and on foot, on the streets and in their homes, at majlises and on the way to work. Entire busloads of people have been sprayed with bullets and peaceful processions blown up.

Lahore imagines itself as somewhat immune to the national carnage
All of Pakistan’s big cities have been witness to horrific sectarian crimes, and even though Lahore has been the site of mass murders and bombings before, it’s a city that continues to imagine itself as somewhat immune to the national carnage. This is a lie and a dangerous delusion. The fear made fact by this heinous act is that everyone is a target. You can be a beleaguered community in a sparsely populated and “troubled” area, or you can be the Head of Ophthalmology at a major metropolitan hospital: there are people here you will kill you and your little son. What you believe, what you think, what you espouse is, eventually, immaterial, even if you have led yourself to believe that you aren’t ruffling any feathers: people will still kill you. It doesn’t matter where you live, which school your children attend, how uncontroversial your job is, what your father is or your grandfather was; people will still kill you. And they will kill you when you least expect it. As you exit a restaurant. As you walk to the gate of your house in the morning to pick up the newspaper. As you are driving your 11-year old son with his new haircut to his school on the fragrant, tree-lined roads of your beloved Lahore.

This is the country we all live in: rich, poor, Shia, Ahmedi, men, women, children.

The protest had the air of a majlis, of the Shia dirge and elegy
The morning after the murders, I woke up to a text message asking me to attend a peaceful protest outside the Governor’s House in Lahore. (This text was immediately followed by one inviting me to a GT in celebration of the Lahore Literary Festival, but that’s a whole other column.) I’ve been asked to come to protests before (some with after-parties) and I do not usually attend on principle (see “after-parties”) but I went to the Governor’s House that day because, well, I don’t know why. The police had closed down the main street, so we lied at the checkpost and said we were going to a wedding at the posh hotel nearby. Walking towards the Governor’s House, we were directed by young Shia men, obviously community volunteers who had taken on the responsibility of arranging security for the protest. They didn’t wear any protective gear and were kind, courteous and helpful. They checked us for explosives and sent us on to the next makeshift checkpoint, assembled out of discarded bits of barbed wire and a billboard for the Lahore Literary Festival. There were no policemen doing this. No state presence, no elite guards, no bomb dogs. Only volunteers. Each and every person we encountered on the way thanked us for our support with a simplicity and sincerity that was heartbreaking.

The actual protest couldn’t have had more than 3,000 people. Men and women sat in segregated rows and looked onto a stage. Most of the attendees were Shias (all those heart-rending cries of “Ya Hussain!”), but there were also people from other sections of charming, crumbling Lahore.

This is not a war. This is a massacre
The friends who accompanied me to the protest expressed their surprise at how well-organized it was. But that’s hardly unexpected. The Shia communities do bigger events every year during Muharram, and are exceedingly well-organized when it comes to crowd control. When I got to the Governor’s House, people were listening to speeches by well-known activists and responding with slogans to their calls to action. The protest had the air of a majlis about it, of the Shia dirge and elegy. It occurred to me that a full-on procession of people doing maatam in front of Governor’s House was as good an expression as any of collective outrage and grief.

I stayed there until they started laying out mats for the approaching prayers. I am glad I went but I came away disturbed. “The battle lines have been drawn,” one person said to me, suggesting there was going to be a battle at all.

Bull.

There is no battle. This is not a war. This is a massacre. We know exactly which ideology is responsible for it, we know who funds it, and we’ve seen the same thing happen repeatedly in other parts of the world. Yet we pretend otherwise. What makes us images it will end differently here?

Deep down, we all know how this will end. We are just too scared to say it. We’ve seen it happen to other countries. Hell, we’ve seen it happen to this country. We detect it every day in the uniforms of our elite guards and we read it between the lines of English op-eds and Urdu columns. I’ve been writing this column for two years now, nestling in events of the day with humor, with my weight issues and my ironic reserves utilized for good measure. But I have not articulated what has become so sadly clear to me of late: there is no “battleground”, there are no “discourses”, there is no “debate”. There is no real opposition to the terror we know is coming and to the place we are becoming.

We, as a people, have failed. And there is no end in sight.

Write to Fayes at [email protected] and follow @fkantawala on twitter
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