The Barbaric Colonial Legacy

The Barbaric Colonial Legacy

It is no strange that an opinion maker Zamarud Naqvi tried to malign Pashtuns by quoting a hundred years old document written by Winston Churchill, a 23-year-old journalist attached for about six weeks to the Malakand Field Force in the Swat Valley in 1897. In order to explain the current crisis in Swat Mr. Naqvi would not bother to visit an IDP camp but would rather sit in his drawing room and rely on the information provided by an imperialist journalist of the British Raj who spend only six weeks in the region and was reporting and justifying the barbarism of his army by presenting the innocent Pashtuns as wild beasts. The disgusting and treacherous views of Mr. Naqvi perpetuate the colonial mentality among Pakistanis (especially Punjabis) through Urdu press in order to seek support for the military operation in Swat.

No need to go into details what Winston Churchill thought of Pashtun as the article of Zamarud Naqvi is self explanatory by equating the freedom fighting of Pashtun against the British Imperialism and Talibanization and in turn labeling Talibanization as typical characteristic of Pashtuns’ genetic make up and the product of their social code Pashtunwali and that Pashtuns have a history of such misadventures by using the name of Islam for plunders and looting. This is on the one hand a direct racist attack on Pashtuns as a nation while on the other hand a villainous design to bring forth before the world a fallacious perception that Pashtuns’ resilience cannot be tamed through diplomacy, bargaining, reformation and political engagement but rather they should be crushed at all cost to make the world a safer place. Mr. Naqvi is trying to blur the line which separates Pashtuns from Taliban and he pushes his readers to the hazy misty history of which the colonial masters and their vassals are so proud of. Such writers in Pakistan are in abundance who would leave no stone unturned to touch even the so-called glory of Nazism in order to prove their loyalty to the power holders. This is one of the biggest problems in Pakistan which is leading it to its inevitable demise.

Coming to the real issue, such mind set in Pakistan is prevalent in the print an electronic media and even top class journalists are sometime fall prey to it. Pashtuns in the military, bureaucracy and politics of Pakistan should respond to such racist and brutal mentality which could further lead to exacerbating the already chaotic and uncertain future of the oppressed nations in the region.