BLM and us

ARTICLE: The killing of an Afro-American man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis, USA, has proved one of those historic tipping points no one could have predicted. The tragic US history of Africans' slavery, being worked to death in the plantation economy of the South, oppression, lynching, etc, was not exactly unknown. Despite the civil rights movement of the 1960s led by such luminaries as Dr Martin Luther King, racial profiling, oppression, discrimination, police and white supremacist violence had remained the lot of the Afro-American community in the US. How to explain then the outburst of criticism, both of words and physical challenge, of this long standing and entrenched system of racial abuse to which not only black people but all non-white communities are subjected in the US? There is no other explanation except to say that this is one of those seminal moments when it can be claimed that this (equality, justice) is an idea whose time has come.

This claim is substantiated by the spread of the idea that Black Lives Matter (BLM), the slogan under which the movement has spread throughout the US and abroad to virtually all countries with a history of slavery, racial, ethnic, indigenous populations' oppression, the rape and murder of whole societies from the least developed to ancient civilisations through colonialism. But if we think the BLM is restricted to challenging white-dominated police and other repression, think again. In Africa today, post-colonial police behave no differently towards citizens than they did during the white man's rule. If anything, they are even more brutal to preserve authoritarian and dictatorial rulers in power.

So while a long overdue reckoning of the sins of colonialism (in all its varieties, including settler colonialism) unfolds, it is necessary to reflect on the fact that the post-colonial order in most developing countries is as bad, if not worse, than in colonial times. As an example of colonial brutality, the decapitated heads of 24 Algerian resistance fighters during the 19th century have only now been returned to be buried in their native soil after being kept in archives in France for about 170 years. This may be the most recent example, but even a cursory perusal of colonial history would throw up a whole gallery of the cruelty, murder, rapine and plunder to which a few emerging capitalist European (white, of course) powers subjected most of the rest of the world.

It may interest readers to know that the Mughal Empire that succumbed to British colonialism in the 17th-18th centuries, represented some 33 percent of world GDP at the height of its powers. It goes without saying then that the Subcontinent was arguably the richest country in the world. Within a period of 250-300 years, the British so exhausted the wealth of the Subcontinent as to leave its people poor, starving, subject to famine, etc, a fate from which they have still to extricate themselves, not the least because the post-colonial state and social construct has left them at the mercy of the structures of power erected/created by the colonialists.

Given this history of oppression at the hands of colonialism, you would have expected a wave of sympathy for the BLM and related movements questioning the colonial legacy in the Subcontinent. Yet an embarrassing virtual silence is all that is available. The other countries of the Subcontinent may have their own reasons/explanations for this unseemly indifference, but in the case of our own country, Pakistan, there could be a number of factors causing this.

First and foremost is the phenomenon of a vacuum of credible political leadership, stretching across the board from the Right to the Left. Even a cursory glance at our mainstream or social media will reveal the dark underbelly of self-censorship (in the mainstream) and wild abuse, conspiracy theories galore (in the social media), adding to the general drift and confusion in our polity for at least the last three decades. A leaderless people are bogged down in the task of daily survival, exacerbated by the coronavirus affliction. Noble ideals and principles are far from their thoughts presently, and there is scarce hope of even a glimmer of light.

Can we honestly say that the issues raised by BLM and the calling-to-account of colonial history is irrelevant to us? Can we, hand on our heart, claim there is no clan, caste, colour, religious, gender, smaller nationalities discrimination in our society? Can we continue to blithely ignore our even worse police and thana (police station) culture and practice of routine recourse to violence and torture, either to extract confessions or extort bribes? Can we continue to ignore the daily fare of deaths in so-called 'encounters' with the police that are a well exposed method of police murders of suspects and the innocent? Can we continue to hide our head in the sand at the long-standing practice of enforced disappearances, the spread of which is bringing more smaller provinces/nationalities to the portals of rebellion?

Pakistan is like most post-colonial states in terms of the system bequeathed by our erstwhile white masters. A nexus of privilege and wealth unites post-colonial state structures and the classes (inherited from British 'largesse' and newly emerged since Independence) sitting on top of a most iniquitous heap. Whereas developed modern states rely on force to quell unrest amongst their own citizens with restraint and as a last resort (the US being a notable exception), opting instead to fashion consensus around the kind of state and society most people would (consciously or unconsciously) accept, our state's first recourse is to violence and repression instead of dialogue and toleration of dissent. This is what led to the loss of half of Pakistan in 1971.

A continuation of such repressive attitudes from the everyday base to the top portals of power threatens what remains of the country. Where there is sham democracy, the throttling of honest dissent, violent repression of movements of grievance, what could be the likely outcome or future? Food for thought, if they wish, for our real rulers.

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Copyright Business Recorder, 2020