I met a little girl in Main Market the other day. I was buying a whole lot of vegetables for a dinner party, and she was begging for money. She was about six or seven, not much older than my eldest, and the baby sister she was carrying on her hip must have been five or six months old—a few months older than my youngest. Predictably, she was one of six siblings, two brothers of three went to school and the rest worked. The mother was home, the father did heaven knows what. And here was this little girl, all by herself, in charge of a tiny baby. The baby began to grizzle, so her older sister pulled a small, grubby bottle with an inch of milk in it out of a plastic bag and stuck it into her hungry mouth. It was soon gone, and the baby was still hungry, so Big Sister filled it up with water from a tap and put it back in the baby’s mouth. I held out my finger and she curled her tiny hand around it, big kohl-rimmed eyes regarding me with an intelligent, friendly gaze. And there I was, asking for new potatoes around the lump in my throat, because my child was at school and my baby was cozily asleep at home while someone else’s kids were sitting next to a stranger in a bazaar, waiting for some money. And how easy would it be—if I were to tell her to get into my car, she might have, because I was being nice to her and maybe had bought her something to eat. I could have taken her home, promising to drop her back after an hour, promising to give her several thousand rupees. I don’t think anyone in the bazaar would have taken much notice of me, even if the little girl tried to refuse and I hustled her away. I could have done anything, and I would have gotten away with it because I am big and wealthy and she is small and poor, and therefore worth nothing.
And every single day there are hundreds of children who are put into cars and taken away, just like this. There are nine year olds who shoot heroin before they are pimped out, so they can blot it all out. Every day there are small, pretty girls like my little friend who are cornered or kidnapped and raped. Street children are perhaps one of the most vulnerable categories of poor there is, and they are being exploited in the most unimaginable ways. What happened in Kasur was horrible, but there was still some uproar, some kind of punishment for the perpetrators because they had parents and families that weren’t yet so disenfranchised that they could do nothing to protect their children. But street kids are children who are sent out to beg. That’s their job. Their parents or families deliberately send them out alone into bazaars and streets. They need the money, they have no skills they can sell, and so the children beg.
The argument is trite by now: most of the beggars you meet are part of a gang, Threepenny Opera style with some mysterious desi Peachums training them to be the best cutpurses and beggars in town. That the homeless jhuggi people actually have plenty of money salted away, but they live like this deliberately so that people keep giving them money out of pity. Perhaps a lot of it is a racket, but the racket is born of need, from a place of poverty and deprivation. Even if it all were part of some elaborate mafia, children are suffering, and to me that is the bottom line. Adults are another category altogether. Adults may be disenfranchised, they might have no choice in a lot of things and they can also be vulnerable, but not in the way a child is. Not in the way those drugged babies are, the ones that sleep all day on the shoulder of whoever is carrying them as a begging prop. Not in the way the eight year old selling popcorn on the side of the road is, the one who is routinely bullied by the older boys, who take his earnings away and give him a few thumps in the process. And certainly not in the way children are increasingly becoming the targets of sexual violence.
If poor people are dispensable, then poor children are the worst off. And it is a vicious cycle that keeps repeating itself and casting its shadow deeper and deeper. People are poor, so they cannot afford schooling in a continuous or quality way. That means they have few skills, which in turn means they are only good for menial labour. Carrying bricks or cleaning houses will only earn you a limited amount. Even the ones who do manage a degree are faced with a stagnant job market. Factor in illness, lack of birth control availability or inclination to use it and social pressures like marriage or wanting a mobile phone and motorcycle on installments and you have a grim situation. The tragedy of it all is that all of it has a remedy, one that can be put into effective place during the tenure of one government, and carried forward by subsequent ones. Because why on earth would any government not want to educate children? Who would be so evil to deny desperately poor people healthcare or safe drinking water? Our governments, that’s who. All of them. They would all rather have a gigantic amusement park instead of shelters for abused and homeless children. They would rather spend their time living outside the country or behind huge fortress-like homes, or wrapped up in their own personal dramas instead of forming oppositions that have teeth, and can help effect change. They are all to blame, and I am sick to death of the entire lot. Because, quite frankly, non-state actors cannot do it all. The charitable organizations, the NGOs, the Edhis, the memorial trusts are all run on limited resources by a handful of amazing people. None of our governments are taking responsibility for what truly matters, because they don’t care and because they know there will be well-intentioned, committed people picking up their slack for them. Ordinary people can only do so much with the resources they have whereas a government can move heaven and earth for its electorate if it really wants to. Ours can’t even get Zaid Hamid out of Saudi jail.

The writer is a feminist based in Lahore.

m.malikhussain@gmail.com