This letter is addressed to the educated members or to the ‘civil society’ of Pakistan.  The figurative ‘civil society’ refers to the erudite and well-heeled financiers, lawyers, fashionistas, businessmen, pious housewives, and democracy-yearning politicians whose rhetoric on social justice and Islamic idioms on ethics dominate the current nationalist narrative for unity and progress. The question posed here is: Do you care about events in Swat? More specifically: Do you care what is happening to children and women in Swat and what their displacement signifies for the building of a democracy?  This letter is addressed specifically to members of civil society and not its counterpoint: the larger population who comprise a majority of the members of this nation-state, with the children and women of Swat exemplifying this ‘other’ category.  For the sake of simplicity we can categorize the ‘other’ as ‘political society’ where social capital does not work out in quite the same way for individuals, where who you know does not lead automatically to social cooperation and political gain.   As members of an erudite civil society, you have always had plenty of social capital backing your success.  You make deals based less on what you know and more on who you know. Your businesses, financial manoeuvrings, and entrepreneurial undertakings cannot succeed without your extensive social capital – your social network - and for some of you this is a necessary entitlement. But this observation is not an indictment against your social capital.  It is an indictment against your silence and unwillingness to protest the displacement of hundreds of children and women in Swat, whose right to a basic entitlement: education is being violently rescinded as the state stands by inert.  This is an indictment against the lawyers’ silence who it seems, cared more deeply for their chief justice as upholder of moral authority. You bonded in your yearnings for justice and used your social capital to fight for the reinstatement of the CJ.  Where is your moral authority to fight for the rights of children and women of Swat?  Are they not fellow citizens?    
                                                                                                            
Events in northern regions of Pakistan have been appalling for over a year. The bearded ones, the lashkars or the Taliban or whatever you chose to call them, are bearing down south, inching closer and closer and gradually posing a threat to our secular and urbane metropolitan lifestyles.   You have discussed ad nauseaum the threat from ‘up north’ in conversation at coffee mornings, weddings, ‘high-level’ business meetings, fashion shows, and religious sermons. You note often how difficult it is ‘to just chill’ under these circumstances.  You shake your heads in unison affirming the Taliban as heathens and barbarians; that they have no sense of social justice and cannot ever, no never ever, be the messengers or deliverers of a just and democratic society.   But here is an interesting thought: The Taliban it seems has an agenda and is using its own social capital to implement it right now in Swat and perhaps later in other parts of Pakistan.  A part of their agenda is to deprive children of their basic right to an education, an entitlement in an effective democratic process.  Now here is another thought: As members of civil society, what is your agenda to counter the Taliban’s?  Or do you believe that having an agenda on Swat is really a matter for the military, the state and the USA?  If you believe the latter then you have implicitly forfeited your right to participate in a process for the building of democracy.  You have argued in your minds that it is the military and the state that are sole arbiters of delivering justice up north. Civil society in Pakistan has no role in this war because it is, or so it seems, powerless.    
Social capital is an important dynamic that facilitates the building of democracy but in Pakistan its does not filter in the same way as in western societies. Social capital in Pakistan does not capture the growing inequalities in the distribution of power and violence that dis-empower so many of our fellow citizens.  Again, the women and children in Swat being one example who are on the receiving end of violence and lack requisite social capital to protest and assert their rights.    If we are to take seriously the project of building a democracy, then each one of us, as members of an elite and privileged civil society has to rethink our positions and ask how can we use our social capital toward facilitating this enormous task?   The answer, my fellow citizens, is a simple one.  It begins by using social capital to generate a critical mass for a united voice that appeals to the moral authority of the state and its ancillary institutions, one that demands accountability and raises the bar in discussions on democracy.  Above all one that is not fixated on the performative act of voting in elections.  If we are fighting for a unified Pakistan then the silence on current events in Swat undermines our noble intentions.  We cannot lay claims to a noble cause of building democracy and delivering social justice if we are unable to use social capital to defend even the rights of the children and women of Swat.  Of the 500 or so primary and secondary schools in Swat, over 100 have been decimated and the rest shutdown.  The forces of violence invoke a message that says unequivocally: children in Swat have no right to education and if schools remain open, these will be destroyed and women and children killed.  So what is the alternative?  Perhaps some of you will recall the residents of Swat as one of the most literate populations in Pakistan.  The sceptre of illiteracy and chaos looms over that region today. 

By asking if you consider the women and children of Swat citizens of Pakistan, I also ask, do you consider the territory of Swat a part of Pakistan?  This is a critical question because it demands if you acknowledge today the multiple cultural, political and psychological fissures that have historically divided our nation and which continue to aggravate our internal problems.  In the recent stand to defend territorial sovereignty against Indian incursions the army and state invoke the often necessary rhetoric of aggression.   The state and the army are ready  fto defend our country against India but have no stand on defending citizens in their daily battles to survive against internally grown threats that make it impossible to retain entitlements.  So here is the space, fellow members of civil society, for you to fill and to write your own destiny for a new and democratic future.  Are you willing to build an agenda and what will be its legacy?

Nausheen H. Anwar
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Harvard University
nha3383@gmail.com