I must admit that until recently I didn’t take social media as seriously as someone ought to in this time and age. Perhaps the first reason was being old-school; the other was the inauthenticity and flimsiness one finds in most things shared. But recently, people like me were made to realise — by the reaction of the state establishment to the views randomly shared by its critics on social media — that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, web pages, etc., must be taken really seriously.

Also, our arch poet Fehmida Riaz once said that she regularly uses her Facebook page to post her thoughts and ideas, ranging from culture and literature to politics and current affairs. Her posts are ardently followed, liked and disliked, commented upon and shared widely by a variety of people. Some days ago, when one of our most well-known writers, Bano Qudsia, passed away, Riaz posted a comment about Qudsia, her work and her politics, on Facebook. It was scathing, to say the least. This was followed by an uproar on her Facebook page. People from both sides of the divide jumped on the opportunity to either hurriedly dismantle Qudsia, or utterly ridicule Riaz. Soon after, she posted an apology. Without retracting from her position, Riaz’s decency, and her experience with the bereavement that death brings to the near and dear ones of the deceased, made her regret not what she had said, but the timing of it. Riaz thought she had been insensitive to the feelings of Qudsia’s family, friends, and admirers and the realisation of the mistake she had made depressed her.

However, it is important to understand why the aggrandisement of Qudsia on mainstream and social media provoked such a response from Riaz. Writers and opinion-makers whose journey of compromise with power began with the times of Gen Ayub Khan, were lead by Qudratullah Shahab, an established writer and an influential civil servant. Both Ashfaq Ahmed and Qudsia were Shahab’s close disciples. Riaz said that it was hard to celebrate the contribution of a mediocre rightist pen-pusher who belonged to a group of writers and opinion-makers whose opportunism irreparably harmed literature, people, and society in Pakistan. She reminisced how Ahmed, who was not only Qudsia’s husband but a comrade-in-arms, would don a Mao cap when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in power and sing praises for Bhutto’s brand of Islamic socialism.

As times changed and Gen Ziaul Haq came to rule the country after physically eliminating Bhutto, Ahmed was proselytising a certain kind of faith to suit Gen Zia’s establishment. Riaz reminded her readers that those were the times when other writers and journalists were being incarcerated, tortured, publicly flogged, or exiled for speaking up for people’s rights. Riaz represented the feelings of those Pakistanis — both readers and writers alike — who not only suffered under autocratic civilian and military rulers, but continue to take the brunt of the twisted narrative and extremist violence which is a product of those regimes. Unfortunately, many people cannot easily understand this connection between the past political policy our rulers pursued and the present social suffering we bear as a consequence.

In my humble view, neither Qudsia nor Ahmed is a mediocre writer. They are important writers and their popularity is not simply an outcome of their favourable circumstances. Some of Qudsia’s fiction and teleplays leave a deep imprint on the minds of her readers and viewers. But she was part of that category of writers who not only conformed to power, but always encouraged conformism through promoting a certain mindset. There are three types of artists and writers: those who refuse to conform, those who are ambivalent, and those who choose to side with power. Here, siding with power does not simply mean becoming the mouthpiece of a government. It includes — particularly in Pakistan — articulating the ideological narrative that suits the rich and the powerful, promoting irrationality by mystifying psychological experience, and preaching to the common people that it is destined for them to live in subordination.

Finally, I leave Riaz with a question. Although she never curried favour from Gen Pervez Musharraf, she certainly had a soft corner for his social liberalism. So one would ask: Is democracy more important or liberalism if the two are at odds?

The columnist is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 19th, 2017