I am Malala

And it goes on and on… Malala’s father was particularly not fond of Pakistan or being a part of this country from the beginning, so much so that she asks her father, ‘Would it have been better if we had not become independent but stayed a part of India?’ She recalls, ‘My father and his friends had nothing to celebrate, as Swat had only suffered since it had merged with Pakistan. They wore black armbands to protest, saying the celebrations were for nothing, and were arrested.’ Malala’s father said that if our politicians hadn’t spent so much money on building an atomic bomb, we might have had enough for schools.

And coming back to Malala’s first thought as she opened her eyes in the Birmingham Hospital, ‘My father has no money. Who will pay for all this?’ – it is a pity that Malala’s father did not get the chance to tell her that the nice Queen would not take any charges from them; Malala was special, she was to address the UN, Obama was to come and meet her, she was to have a day dedicated to her that is going to be called the ‘Malala Day’ and Ban ki Moon was to call her ‘his hero’. Gordon Brown, Angelina Jolie, Megan Smith were all to be her fans. In fact, the world’s top PR consulting firm, Edelman, took the responsibility of her PR; Ashutosh Munshi , an Indian, would be her media strategist and Christina Lamb would be her biographer, the same Mrs. Lamb who had been deported from Pakistan on serious allegations in 2001. And nothing for the other two girls who were shot with her in the same van?

All this celebration of Malala was a good thing, but only if not to be used as a face-saver for all the atrocities of the war that has been waged upon the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the name of ‘War on Terror’. Malala, our daughter, would still be our pride if celebrating her did not mean compromising the thousands of deaths from drones used by the US/NATO upon our innocent people on the same soil they picked Malala from. Does championing one Malala make the whole Europe and the United States good in the eyes of the world? And is she going to be used now as another weapon against the pride and survival of an already war-torn people?

Above all that, was innocent Malala the only way left for the liberal lobby to further their ideas? Can Malala herself, belonging to the meager living conditions of Mingora, have been a full-fledged proponent of liberalism at such a tender age? Surely Christina Lamb’s fill-up and the induced memories of Malala’s father add disgrace to injury; in entitling Malala to this highly politicized commentary, wherein no paragraph is left without raising a new issue, Malala is no more left an innocent 16 year old, shot by the Taliban on her way to school. The Birmingham experience has taken away all that and confronted her with the ideology of Pakistan, the sanctity of the Quaid, the respect of the institutions and the simple love for one’s country that every individual is entitled to. The agenda of this book is not of innocent Malala’s; it is the agenda of a vast machine that surrounds her at this time

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Clips from I am Malala: Search by Zaki Khalid