NGOs; The Guise

No doubt the issues picked up by the NGOs have weight, but can these issues be sliced out of the whole fabric of the society and dealt with in isolation, on the drawing-boards of the stakeholders? Can we ask the child to stop working without giving him/her sustainable alternatives? Can we ask the home-servants to sit at home and starve? Can we ask the woman to leave her husband and start her own business or at least start hating him? Should the NGOs not be advocating love and harmony in the family, should they not be in the fields to improve the literacy standards in the existing government schools where thousands are already enrolled but absent? Should they not be in the state-run hospitals, making sure that so much government fund is put into good use? Why do they have to stand against and not with the clergy, why can they not find common grounds, why do they need a state within the state and not work with the existing machinery, however weak it may be, why is confrontation their backbone?

It is complained against the NGOs in Pakistan that they give too much pooh-poohing to ‘male domination’ and ‘female subordination’, ignoring the women as active agents and the fact that they show some power in shaping their lives, at least by resistance and accommodation, even with the most meager resources. It is complained against them that in the stance of giving ‘awareness’, the youth has generally become more aware of all the possibilities of experimenting with what was previously hidden in the dark-room of sin, hence promoting all sorts of vulgarism and baseness in society and moving the nation towards the secularization of religion; that the NGOs never show empathy when it sees nakedness, adultery and desire being flushed into society through all channels of information and only yell their throats out when the same has been attempted on an innocent and then they turn out to blame religion for that. These specific priorities signify the agenda they work for or help to implement, maybe without being aware of it, as they themselves are just one link in the multilayered industry of philanthropy.

This agenda is clearly seen in the overview as the Feminist agenda, it aims at destroying the family system and converting the individuals into a manageable workforce; when the individual will have no loyalty with their loved ones they will make loyalty with the organization; when the family will not act as a unity, committed to each other’s welfare, united under the instruction of God, unto Whom all things unite, then the only religion left for the previously family-person now converted-into-worker, will be the manifesto of the organization.

Such split standards and inability to bring visible change and their persistent presence on the political front, the articulate medium and the mainstream Media converts the NGOs from non-political, good-hearted, committed-to-service people into a contingent of lowly paid brokers of faith and ideology. Yes, lowly paid! Because what the imperialists used to do with elaborate cavalry maintained at exuberant costs, now they can do with unarmed foot-soldiers, funded with beggar-money, who will parasitically stick to the hosts and make them believe that they are the real them; who will, as they inject the cancer of secular-feminist-individuality into a previously religious community filled with love and respect, insist that this is the cure of their disease, that they should be thankful to them, that they have brought the high morals to our immoral ways of life.

Unaware, perhaps, that in their guise, their donors have accomplished many fronts with no-boots-on-ground. Pity on us, how we will soon be seeing the rotting body of our nation, dying a painful cancerous death, which is the right fate of a nation weary of doing its own chores and relying on aid from others: the dependent can never be the rulers.