By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

IT is false to say those were lawyers attacking doctors or doctors under attack on December 11^th in Lahore. It was us: people like you and me were doing that to people like you and me in and to our hospital. Something increasingly toxic within and around us is generating an atmosphere of violence. Personal self-respect has degenerated into self-righteous entitlement and intimidatory demand. Can we arrest this slide into the bestial before we all become completely desensitized or submerged?

               When and where did it begin? It is chastening to remind ourselves that an angrily contested partition was integral part of the subcontinent’s venture into self-rule. Simply put: this vast subcontinent’s major Muslim minority and heavily Hindu majority did not trust each other enough to share a common space. That was 1947. In 2019 the polity is still wrangling violently within its separate states, failing to resolve a sociopolitical equation of common human interest: We can justly point a finger at the subcontinent’s cannabilistic mother India; emergent Pakistan; Bangladesh; Nepal; Bhutan; and even a not that safely enough offshore Sri Lanka. Why then is the rampage at Lahore’s PIC particularly horrifying?