When our planet was sparsely populated and human beings were in small number they faced a dreadful prospect of extinction as the natural forces beyond their control seemed to overwhelm them at every step. Entire effort was aimed at preserving and protecting human life. Strangely, even in those hazy times we can find traces of the phenomenon of suicide.

Rig-Veda, the earliest scripture in the recorded history, clearly refers to and documents the acts or cases of ritual suicide in the form of mimetic self-immolation generally known as Sati. A widow was ordered to climb up her dead husband’s funeral pyre. She would lie beside the dead body for some time and would be removed by her family /clan before lighting the pyre. Mahabharata, the great epic, at several places cites the cases of Sati which were mostly confined to upper caste widows. After the Pyrrhic victory at Kurukshetra, the Pandavas were left with nothing except grief, sorrow and corpses of Kauravas, their cousins and tribesmen. Heavily weighed down by such an irretrievable loss and painful absurdity of the situation Pandava brothers Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva led by their eldest Yudhishthira committed suicide in the Himalayas. Doesn’t his glimpse of our ancient past remind us of a contemporary scene of our collective life? It has an eerie resemblance. Let’s not forget that what caused that apocalyptic war was thinly-concealed power struggle that ended in the destruction of all concerned.

Suicide has now become a universal phenomenon that affects society at multiple levels. It has frequent occurrence at individual level. At collective level it is infrequent and occasional but it does occur - which is our concern in this piece. In our times it usually surfaces as dismemberment of the so-called nation state and the society (s) it helped develop through hidden and open coercion. This happened to us in 1971 when the majority of Pakistan decided to go for independence when its democratic right to form the government was denied by the power wielders of erstwhile West Pakistan after fair and free elections. It was in fact culmination of a process of denial of cultural, linguistic and economic rights which alienated the Bengali majority. Later in the 20th century we witnessed great upheavals in the Eastern Europe when erstwhile Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated in chaotic conditions. The former broke into seven countries after horrible bloodshed and genocide. The latter gave birth to Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the case of Yugoslavia it was diversity that posed the problem which its elite tried to turn it into artificial unity with the state repression and coercion in the name of so-called higher national ideals. All the oppressive tools eventually backfired and led to the break-up of the state. Pakistan had faced the same problem; diversity that had multiple lingual, cultural, economic and geographical dimensions.

Yugoslavia employed socialism to paper over the cracks caused by diversity and Pakistani state used religious ideology to create a semblance of national unity. The problem with ideology is that it refuses to recognise the reality, at times even the existence of what doesn’t fall within its ambit. It constructs its own seemingly higher reality with disregard for facts with a view to achieving certain predetermined goals while aiming at apparently sacred ideals which would not be sustainable as a part of historical mainstream. The more the effort is made to materialise them the more they become unattainable for being not rooted in the concrete conditions of life. Using force becomes inevitable which eventually makes it self-defeating. This was exactly the kind of suicidal path Pakistan treaded and got dismembered in the previous century. Ideology of faith and monoculture - Urdu language for example - was used to create national unity which resulted in disunity forcing Bengalis to secede from the Pakistani state in absolute mayhem. It destroyed the very thing it was invented to protect and promote, national unity.

Ideology conceals within its core the vested interests of the groups and classes which fashion it. Vested interests regardless of whether they are of economic, political and cultural nature are driven by hegemonic desires of certain groups and classes which employ ideology as a tool to control and direct things.

Country’s elite despite having received a bloodied nose in the aftermath of independence of Bengal has refused to learn anything as it still with all it persistent cunningness clings to the ideology that abysmally failed to deliver in the past. What failed in the past would fail in the future too. But does our intellectually and morally bankrupt elite has the ability to read the omens which loom up ahead of us on our politico-economic and socio-cultural horizons? Obviously not if we look at things as they stand today. It is elite’s sheer incapacity that seems to be an insurmountable impediment in the way.

The elite, a product of colonial and post-colonial conditions with a skewed sense of direction, has predatory nature; it extracts as much as possible from the people while invests little on them. It swaggers up and down the suicidal path forgetting that it will lose what it loves to rule; the people. It’s suicidal in the sense that the elite miserably fails to carry out what it solemnly promises the people in its contract with them. It fails to protect life and property of the people, provide them education and medical care, and look after their economic and political rights while it ruthlessly exploits ad infinitum.

Suicide generally signifies loss of dreams and hope. Life, individual and collective, has inbuilt love of preservation and survival. Loss of love for life is caused by something extraneous such as extractive social structures which deny happiness that is invariably premised on the realisation of potential we have as individuals and collective. Any system that fails to create conditions which help us move towards what we could be is suicidal. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 12th, 2022