The struggle
with suicide
Written By: Aziz Ali Dad
Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) forms a
single cultural unit because of its shared geography, historical memory and
collective unconsciousness. The cohabitation of people within the same
geographical space and cultural sphere has enabled local communities to develop
a shared indigenous worldview.
This worldview has informed the traditional structures of
governance and the social contract for centuries. However, the autochthonous
conceptual framework of the world has started to wane after the region was
exposed to modernity, modernisation and globalisation.
The changes in the political, social and economic structures of GB
have drastically altered the function of social institutions and impacted
people. This has resulted in a rupture that manifests itself in altered perceptions;
a disconnect between the individual and society; spiritual and moral fractures;
and the breakdown of communication and the social contract. The increasing
trend of suicides among the youth in GB is symptomatic of a deep social crisis
that ensues from spiritual fractures and social fissures.
The issue of suicides among the youth is even more alarming
because people are either in denial or simply unaware of the malaise within
society that makes young people suicidal. Last week, a 13-year-old girl in
Hunza committed suicide over an incident at her school. In 2017, 23 people
committed suicide in Ghizer district alone. These incidents reflect the demise
of the traditional social contract that helped individuals connect with the
social fabric.
Various institutions, entities and actors in society seem to have
drained the youth of their dreams; thwarted self-actualisation; alienated
individuals from society; and ultimately compelled the youth to take their own
lives.
Introspection is needed to explore the possible causes of suicides
in Gilgit-Baltistan. But a society that is in denial lacks the courage to
explore the demons within it. As a result, the easiest explanation is to
attribute all social ills to the proponents of change. Instead of diagnosing what
has gone wrong in society, our guardians create scapegoats in the form of
women, young people and vulnerable groups and accuse them of defiling the
social structure. This attitude is the product of an inverted mind that tends
to focus on the symptoms and fails to address the root cause of an illness.
In the context of Gilgit-Baltistan, the situation has been further
aggravated because the existing institutions have readymade explanations about
the increase in the suicide rate, but know little about its possible causes. As
a result, a peculiar situation has arisen where the healer is providing a cure
without having any knowledge of the illness. The reasons that have been
proposed to explain the incidence of suicide lack a clear understanding of the
problem, and have imposed an onerous burden on young people.
To understand the existing conditions of the youth in
Gilgit-Baltistan, we need to analyse what has happened to society at the
collective level, and assess its impacts on young people. At the collective level,
the traditional worldview in Gilgit-Baltistan connected society, nature and the
self under a single moral framework. This way of seeing the world infuses every
animate and inanimate object with meaning and soul.
If viewed in this manner, the whole universe appears to be the
womb that provides security to every individual. The respect shown for elders
and the dominance of the spirit of our ancestors on the social milieu of
Gilgit-Baltistan are a sign of this ontological security.
Now, this form of traditional security has melted under the
pressure of modernity. With the disenchantment of the traditional worldview,
the new generation have cut the umbilical cord of motherly traditions to assert
their individuality. One of the key attractions of modernity is that it has
provided a space for the individual to emerge. According to Erich Fromm, this
freedom also entrusted individuals with a greater burden: the loss of security.
This ultimately fuels loneliness and isolation, which Fromm refers to as ‘basic
anxiety’.
Mutations within the human condition and the changes that it
brings in the structure of experiencing the world propels people to find
alternatives. Owing to intellectual poverty and the absence of a modern
vocabulary, the youth of Gilgit-Baltistan have become free-floating entities in
the vacuum of existence. A rudderless or blind existence leads to destructive
behaviour at the individual and social levels. Neuroses, tension, stress,
schizophrenia, social conflict and the emergence of cults are symptoms of a
poisonous social habitus.
In Gilgit-Baltistan, the strong façade of a crumbling society is
kept intact by the institutions and entities that claim to be the guardians of
tradition. Nevertheless, its noxious impact has entered at the individual level
by creating fractures between the youth and the dominant narratives,
institutions, entities and customs.
Owing to the control of diehard guardians on society, the social
and mental space is constricted for the expanding mind of the youth that is
forming new horizons by gaining exposure to exogenous ideas, lifestyles and the
experience of an uprooted existence.
Today, the new generation of Gilgit-Baltistan form their
perspective of society, the self and the world through experiences of modernity
and globalisation rather than traditions that are tucked within the faded
memory of their elders. The youth tend to feel at home with the new language in
the time of modernity because its vocabulary has an elective affinity with
their life.
The communication breakdown between the old and new generation
occurs because the former resurrects the vocabulary of tradition that does not
resonate with the lived experience of the youth. The social realm is,
therefore, in the grip of a clash whereby the dying mind of traditions has
cramped the space for the emerging vocabulary of modernity by dominating the
social space.
Even the reflections of local intellectuals about ruptures,
fissures and fractures in society tend to adhere to traditional perspectives.
Most local intellectuals – like their parents, religious leaders and elders –
blame the youth for deviating from the traditional ethos of society. In
addition, parents tend to deprive children of a bright future. Instead of
allowing their children to live their own dreams, they try to transfer their
own aspirations onto them.
This shows that there is a failure on the part of existing social
institutions to enable the youth to achieve self-actualisation. Parents,
religious leaders, intellectuals, healers, teachers and the cultural ethos have
collectively failed in this regard. All these factors, including education,
must be seen as part of the problem and not the solution. Instead of involving
the youth in the nexus of community relations, the dominating entities and
institutions dislocate the individual from his or her environment and produces
existential alienation. Anthony Giddens is of the view that such a situation
“is closely associated with the most characteristic of psychological state of
the suicide: an unbearable feeling of loneliness”.
The current trend of suicides is a form of protest by the
suffocated self that finds itself in a society that creates a suicidal
ambience. Reflecting on the issue of suicide, a social worker from Hunza told
this writer that: “our existing educational beliefs and practices do not
produce young people who are able to find their fulfilment from within.
Similarly, the influence of parents and society on the youth is crippling,
instead of enabling. Those whose world becomes too suffocated for them to
breathe end up committing suicide”.
The communication breakdown is not limited to the interaction
between the old and new generation. There is also a lack of communication among
the youth. This has resulted in a culture of silence that pushes an individual
towards isolation. In order to address the maddening silence and stem the trend
of suicide among youth in Gilgit-Baltistan, a culture of conversation and
dialogue needs to be developed at formal and informal spaces.
Instead of asking young people to choose the path of cut-throat
competition in the education sector or the job market, they should be instilled
with a “beatific vision” of life where every energy and activity is geared to
enable the new generation to live their life fruitfully. This can be done by
shifting the basis of being from what Erich Fromm refers to as the mode of
having to the mode of being.
The writer is a freelance
columnist based in Gilgit.
Email: azizalidad@gmail.com
