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Lawari’s Impact on our Social Life

 Sherzad Khan Chitral

 The discourse on the potential positive as well as adverse impact of Lawari tunnel on Chitralis is going to enter in to a new phase where, with completion of this huge project, a distant dream of inhabitants of this remote district would become true. There should be no question that the whole Chitral must remember all the individuals who contributed to turn a wish in to reality at various level of continuous struggle for communal survival. In addition to federal government of ZA Bhutto and Pervez Musharaf, other individuals include the local political and community leaders who continuously raised the issue at various forums. The issue was also raised in National Assembly well before the era of ZA Bhutto as a single agenda for the development of Chitral.

 One of the important aspects of this project is its humanitarian oriented investment. Because in the developing countries like Pakistan, most of the investments are made on economic ground by ensuring that the economic returns of any proposed project must be greater than the amount injected in to the project. Unless the strategic location of Chitral is utilized economically to its full potential by making it a gateway in terms of trade with Central Asian countries, China and India, one cannot justify this huge investment with regard to economic returns and beneficiary base. If the total investment made in this tunnel is 8 billion, with total (estimated) 46,500 families in the district, per household cost of the project becomes Rs. 170,000 (or more than 2100 per person). It means that if this amount could be distributed among the people in Chitral, every family would share Rs. 170,000. With a number of options available to the government (with scare resources) for investing in development sector, it is always difficult decision for government to make a people driven investment. The Chitralis are quite right in extending gratitude to the former president of Pakistan who personally took interest in this project and decided to construct 8.6 km long tunnel.      

 With this brief background and context, in this article I would like to highlight one of the important aspects of social dimension of the potential impact of this development on the lives of Chitrali people. This is a fairly understood fact that with numerous avenues for economic opportunities in relation to increased trade, reduced transportation cost, potential for marketing of local agricultural products and handicrafts, increased tourism and improved social and physical infrastructure, the Chitralis may embrace some adverse impact on their social structure and cultural values. To this end, however, the fundamental question is that to what extend we can show unity as Chitrali and what would be our collective response to the issue which may rupture our current social structure and disturb our history long cultural setup if we show disorganized attitude and inactiveness in a developing social turmoil as a result of this new intervention. Let us have a look at our current and changing chemistry of social fabrics in Chitral. The mosaic of our social structure has been vulnerable since it involves a number of sensitivities directly related to social inclusion or exclusion of people at household and community level. I would not touch the religious aspect in this article as there is an established dichotomy existed in the region and it also offers a readymade divider if external forces to intervene with any agenda. Therefore we keep focus on our social strengths as one group of people in the current discussion.  

With increased literacy rate, Chitralis think that they have impressed outsiders a one, united and civilized people with a great social cohesion and political tolerance. But ground realties demonstrate different picture of their social cohesiveness and tolerance. With a retrospect of our memorable history, one can arrive at the conclusion that as part of our general behavior, we always prefer to work on dividers rather connectors. The social division which strongly emerged during the last general election exemplifies this social attitude. The irony is that we are not open to this issue and we keep our intensions secret and present ourselves totally different to what we have in our minds. Let us take the example of candidate selection process of one of the largest political parties in the district. The criterion for selection of candidate was unique and interesting. It was not the association of the candidate with the party, his/her track record, services rendered to public/party, competency and political credentials but it appeared to be the personal association of the candidate with a certain segment of the population. Based on this single criterion, the decision of the party was widely disowned by the workers on the ground that the candidate belonged to a certain family. Otherwise the candidate appeared to be a bona fide member of the party. The selection of alternative competent candidate was also affected adversely on the same ground. As a result, the district lost the opportunity to be part of the current government politically. 

In addition to regional biases and discriminations (shown in the diagram as cross-cutting), the push and pull factors with regard to this division shows an increasing trend in the region with a severe adverse impact on social, political and development/community institutions. One can conduct a social investigation to find out that what social, political and economic factors feed this phenomenon of social chaos. It can be seen that how social realignments have been taking place in a small group of people (approximately 380,000 individuals only) in mountainous area in terms of ethnicity. Think for a second, do we really need a clan identity and proved ethnicity to survive socially?  Is it not possible that we live as Chitralis since we all speak one dialect and share common cultural values? (Ostensibly at least Chitralis show respect for each other irrespective of their ethnic association). Unfortunately, nobody is ready to speak on the topic - but people continue working to widen the social gaps. Some of the groups have declared themselves as socially superior, however other think that was not true. Some groups have recently declared their social identity and association with other groups/clans and then at the same time they try to develop larger group of people with same ideology and link it with their political interest. I believe that the key reason for such a socially constructed hierarchy is a result of history long discriminative access of people to physical resources such as land and exploitation of strong group due to absence of social justice. The so-called stronger groups/clans would not find any reason in their generation chain to be superior (most of these are non-traceable and disconnected beyond few decades) than the unjustified control over resources in this remote area. Their strong hold on institutions and resources presents plausible reason for being part of a separate political and social network. However, the question that why the people from other groups with great human and financial capital have not been able to be part of this network at community and institution level is still unanswered.

 There has been a major challenge for the people who have different thoughts and see the situation as harmful to the society and supportive to the external efforts for exploiting the civilized but less exposed Chitralis economically. The political landscape of the region is also dominated by this misperception. One can only hope that our youth (there has been disappointment to great extent with regard to political and community leadership in this regard) may come out of this dilemma and identity confusion and set a direction for social and economic development of this beautiful area in their mind. When Chitralis are exposed to the outside world after the completion of Lawari tunnel, the existing social tension fueled by ill-advised local politicians with personal interest is going to weaken the already fragile social structure further and it may create the similar situation as it took place in Thailand and Muree (Pakistan) where the fast pace of economic development overrun the social infrastructure and the ingenious people failed to survive due to being unprepared for a drastic social change.