Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 14:12:17 +1000
Subject: Suicides in a Postcolonial State called Pakistan


http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/aug99-daily/19-08-99/oped/o2.htm

Politics of suicides
by
Foqia Sadiq Khan

Imagine someone calls a press conference and narrates the tales of his woes
and then takes out a pistol from his pocket and shoots himself. Seems like
a scene of a Hollywood movie? But it isn't. This is what Lala Jahangir did
in February 1999 at a local hotel in Shikarpur. The tragedy fits the script
for a sensational movie. However, there are no lights, camera or sound
effects. It is a bloody suicide of a political activist who chose to kill
himself in public.

Lala wasn't sick. He was a political activist since his student days in the
University of Sindh, Jamshoro. During his 15-year long association with the
Pakistan People's Party--much persecuted during General Zia's martial
law--he was disabled in a police shootout. Maimed, he could not earn two
square meals for his family; an agonising realisation for one who believed
in political activism, with a growing consciousness that party politics is
not about ordinary folks like him. Otherwise why would he blame PPP's top
leadership before taking his life?

People go to hotels for eating out, meetings and weddings; Lala went there
to shoot himself in a press conference. It was bizarre--and cruel.

However, the spate of recent public suicides did not begin with Lala
Jahangir. Hakim Zadi and Zainab Nisa had burnt themselves to death in
Hyderabad in September 1998. The two sisters immolated themselves in a
meticulously planned act of "public" suicide. Date of the act was announced
beforehand and the venue was the civil courts building.

The cause of their deadly anguish was well known too. Their brother and
other members of the family were killed without reason in the infamous
Tando Bahawal case. Finally, the curtain was raised from the events and
Capt Arshad Jamil Janjua was sentenced to death for killing innocent people.

But the aggrieved families had another battle to fight: the implementation
of the sentence. Two years went by and nothing happened. Zadi and Nisa
publicly set themselves on fire to protest the injustice of our judicial
system.

Another public suicide, another personification of protest. Flames consumed
the life of a forcibly retired worker--Allah Bakhsh alias Bhooro--of the
Sindh Road Transport Corporation (SRTC) in January 1999. He immolated
himself in front of the Hyderabad Press Club. Chan Zeb was the next to go a
few days after Bhooro's suicide. Zeb had come to Prime Minister's residence
in Model Town all the way from Karachi to seek help. Little did he know
that there would be no bells hanging in the so-called open kutchery of our
democratically elected prime minister. He was not allowed to cry his heart
out before the PM; rather he was beaten and insulted by the police. Zeb
called it a day. He had enough of poverty, helplessness and misery.

The location of public suicides moved towards north--the heartland of
Pakistan--and yet another self-immolation. The government set up Khidmat
Committees (KCs) as a watchdog over the (mis)use of public office. But how
can unaccountable local influentials safeguard public interest? Members of
a "qabza group", in collusion with two members of an Islamabad Khidmat
Committee, deprived Tahir Khokar of his kiosk in one of the markets in the
capital. The kiosk was his only source of livelihood.

He ran from post to pillar for justice, and sent applications to police
officials and the interior ministry. But somehow justice turns a blind eye
to the poor in post-colonial states like Pakistan. It was certainly true in
Khokar's case. His body was next to be engulfed by the flames of death in a
sunny April day.

Though suicides are not new to our society, the recent acts of
self-immolation somehow stand apart. No suicide is an individual, isolated
act in itself; it is a comment on socio-political conditions and the
context in which it is perpetrated. But probably one can find fewer cases
that are so profound and expressive. Zadi and Nisa sisters, Lala Jahangir,
Bhooro, Chan Zeb, Tahir Khokar and others like them committed what I call
"public" suicides to make a statement.

 

While we need not eulogise such extreme acts of protest as a public
manifestation of social unrest, yet the publicness of these events is
mind-boggling. What would have went on their mind when they decided to
orchestrate their death? They did not die just to escape the ugliness of
their daily lives; they wanted to announce their misery to the rest of the
world. They wanted to register their helplessness. They wanted to document
their protest over the lack of right to life in our society. And they did
so publicly.

The government eventually responded to this epidemic of suicides. The Prime
Minister's Special Grievances Cell prepared a working paper, "suggesting to
the policymakers to lawfully restrict the print media from publishing news
items related to suicides" according to a news item of May 20, 1999. The
paper also suggested to educate people that suicide is against Islam and
asked that the electronic media present programmes to "strengthen courage"
in people and recommended establishment of independent psychotherapy
centres for people who survive suicide attempts.

The working paper reflects the way our government handles such complex
problems. 

The people who committed suicides belonged to the most marginalised and
disempowered groups of society. In most of these cases their sources of
livelihood were snatched away. They were not left with any choice. It is
ridiculous to think that people are burning themselves to death because of
the expected publicity in the print media. Only the PM's Special Grievances
Cell can come up with such a bizarre explanation.

The theoretical and empirical underpinnings of suicide have been adequately
researched in the context of the industrialised countries. Following the
early Greek discourse on human passions and physical desires, the Stoics
were in favour of counseling suicide to deal with the otherwise unavoidable
pain. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre thought of human existence as an
absurd phenomenon: suicide is "the final absurdity" to them; people
physically eliminate themselves to essentially get rid of the consciousness
of absurdity.

In his seminal work on the suicides, French sociologist Emile Durkheim
located a purely individual act of suicide in the context of social forces.
The jabbering of patterns of social relations leads to an emotional vacuum
and despair. It led to a growing sense of alienation in the emerging
capitalist society of the 19th century Europe marked by the division of
labour.

How do we theorise suicides in our context? An extreme sense of frustration
is a cross-cutting drive. Yet in our context, sense of alienation seems to
be closely linked to socio-political disempowerment. Self-immolation as a
form of protest seems be a particular genre of suicide--public suicide. Its
roots can be traced back to Buddhist traditions; monks and nuns would burn
themselves as a form of protest. Fire, flames, charred bodies symbolically
denote anger, frustration, and social marginalisation.

Few cases discussed in this article indicate a direct relationship of
public suicides with the politics of state. Poverty, extrajudicial
killings, failure of political parties, senseless downsizing of the public
sector, the hollowness of populist problem-solving measures of the PM and
the administrative and judicial breakdown, are some of the overriding
factors which led these people to express their discontent in such extreme
acts.

These cases (and many others) are symptomatic of the way the state
functions. It explains why these protestors inflicted death in front of the
symbols of state power (civil courts, the PM residence). They tortured
themselves to death but did not die in vain. They publicised their
miseries, helplessness, and extreme lack of control; highlighted the biases
of the state; and announced that they are being murdered through structural
repression. Would anyone take the state to court for denying the right of
life to these people?


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