Refugee for Life?

Our fates collide with each others spinning webs of intricate plots. We are in pain and will be all our lives. We hate everything and love so much, and keep breaking down in our own ways, each of us having dug a deep cave within ourselves, hiding all our fears and anxieties. “That’s life” we are conditioned since birth, but is it really just this monotony of pain and fleeting happiness. Is this “just life” or have we made it into this ephemeral hole where we constantly plough the seeds of our surrender.

Our hate and our love are contextual litanies, arising from who we are. Not many of us ever question the reason of this hate and ambivalence. Which causes so much destruction and chaos in our world. It starts from the larger set of physical identities, white, black, brown moving to the socio religious ground of Christians, Muslims and Jews. We then further break it down into nationalities and when we are done with that, we start looking within our nations to find the differences and barricades. Out of this we hear the labels of Punjabis, Sindhis, Muhajirs, Balochis and Pathans emerging. National identities transform into potential set of ascribed characteristics, which we can conveniently apply without even knowing a single thing about each other. Our belief in this divide is amazing, as entire communities develop norms of viewing another community and everyone accepts this absolute belittling of humanity and eerily adopts it to a certain degree into their personas.

Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, I was a child when I first heard the term Muhajir or Hindustani. It meant nothing to me when I heard it in school. I was a Pakistani and that’s all that made sense. There was however swift enlightenment, as I was called a Muhajir after a childish scuffle. I didn’t understand it at all, but my natural curiosity beckoned. I went home and asked my mother who told me that a Muhajir is a refugee. With the influx of large numbers of Afghani Refugees flowing into our urban centres, I was taken aback by the revelation that somehow I was like them, a refugee. On understanding my continued tribulation my mother inquired into the reasons for my enquiry. I was then informed that as a member of the Urdu Speaking community whose great grandparents migrated from India, I will for the rest of my natural life, even whilst being born in Pakistan, raised in Pakistan and thoroughly a Pakistani, will be referred to as a Muhajir. This apparently provides an excellent human classification system for the population. An easy, laid back assessment of who and what I essentially am.

Readers at this point might digress, as national identities is a source of pride in one’s own heritage. I couldn’t agree more with this, yet this “pride” without fail takes on much more uglier forms that could only be described by words such as “Bigotry”, “Racial Perceptions” and general ambiguity about the other. My question to those who would like to push the “Pride” Argument is that how do you stop the lines of these proud identities blurring into the contortions of hate, ignorance and perceived divisions. An example of this is intermarriages between communities, which has improved over the last decade or so but remains to be an issue where the first queries from either party are about their regional, racial lines. We can look around us and see numerous examples of the cases where inter regional marriages have been tainted with problems of perceptions from either sides. In extreme cases the married individuals themselves assume these identities or view their partner from the traps of regionally biased perspectives.

I have analysed this problem to an extent for myself. I am indeed proud of my heritage and the legacy of the Hindustani Muslim identity. Yet, If I look at it closely, I am only a Pakistani and as apt as this label would have been for my Grandfather who was infact a Hindustani Muhajir, it does not apply to me. From my perspective and specially from the perspective of my now deceased grandfather, he was neither Hindustani nor a Muhajir, after the moment he crossed that line of control in 1947. He did not come thousands of miles, lost his loved ones and left behind everything he knew or recognised to come to Pakistan where his sons and their sons will still be referred to as Hindustani refugees.

Again politicians, the abusers of collective human group identities, use this to their advantage. A lot is discussed about the politicisation of religion and the degenerative effect it has had on the direction of the nation’s religious ethos. Yet the wider issue of the continued abuse of the regional identity, as political tools to divide and rule remain unquestioned. Who is a politician to tell me, how to define who I am, just based on the region my family originates from. Yet if we look around us, how much of our perception about a Muhajir, a Sindhi or a Balochi is formed out of personal experience or merely our view of the leaders of that particular region. Take the ever- evolving Chief Sahib, currently in a state of self-enforced exile in London. The propagator of the 80s so called revolution of the birth right of the Muhajir and their claim to the land of Southern Sind. I was a teenager in the days of Operation Clean up when the leader ran to London, whilst thousands of his Muhajir recruits to the APMSO and the MQM, were murdered by the Pak Army. Many of those young men, who signed up driven by the regional fervour created by the brainwashing of the Muhajir Phenomenon. Nobody can deny the ecstasy and the power that was felt in the high days of the MQM and slogans of absolute power initiated by the Leaders, who at the time looked and possibly felt invincible. Nobody can forget the idiotic pictures on the Rotis and the fishes. That was quite possibly, the first real urban political scam initiated with that level of success. It has apparently changed today with the word Muhajir leaving the vocabulary of the same leaders, replacing it by Muttahida, which preaches solidarity of the entire province, Sindhi & Muhajir alike.

In Conclusion, and you will respect that this is my conclusion. Pakistanis should give up their identities all together. We should rename the provinces with digits and recognise each other by no other barometer than that of personal achievement, conduct and treatment towards each other. I still believe that religion should play a part in our social outlook as the Prophet PBUH himself stated that we should view each other out of the humanity that we manifest and nothing else. This is an almost impossible euphoria, however this self-imposed revolution will never be collective. It has to start with me and you, and all those who we can touch by our actions. Our instigation and resolution today, will change our children and their children. Or it might fail completely. In any case, no failure will stop me to state that I am not a Muhajir or a refugee. This is my land as much as any one else born on it. I have been born here and will probably die here. I know nowhere else in this world that defines me so completely as a person, than this collective land with all the perils that it constitutes. I am one with its evils and am the manifestation of all that is good about it.