The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

Yet nostalgia and denial could not mask the cruel, ugly and downright terrifying side of Pakistan. Hateful currents swirled close to the surface of daily life. Extremists attacked Christians, Shias and other minorities – gunning them down in the streets, torching their homes and blowing up their places of worship. Discrimination was enshrined in the law. Members of the Ahmadi faith, considered heretics by orthodox Muslims, had to renounce a central tenet of their faith to get a passport. Justice was a function of income: the rich and well connected could steal, kill and avoid their taxes with wide impunity. Women were subjected to heinous violence – shot, stabbed or strangled, often by their own families – in the name of ‘honour’. Others were burned with acid, their faces melting in agonising pain, all for the rage of a jealous or insecure man. Such crimes were so banal as to barely merit a few inches in the papers, alongside the other tales of heartbreaking desperation: a maid found hanging from a fan in her employer’s living room; a rickshaw driver, driven crazy by poverty, who killed his children, his wife and then himself. As much as anything, those small stories presented a searing indictment.