The moral of the story of the incident that riveted the nation as much as it polarised it earlier this week is that unity is the charm that helps Pakistan rise above all challenges.
By Ahmer Kureishi
The nation held its breath as the news broke that six schoolchildren and two adults were stuck in a homemade cable car used to ferry passengers across a deep ravine along the Jhangra river in the Allai tehsil of the mountainous Battagram district of Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
The high drama full of suspense and fraught with hazard began between 7:00 am and 8:00 am on August 22, 2023 – when two of the three ziplines of the cable car snapped after the children boarded it to go to their school across the ravine. It continued into the night and ended more than 14 hours later when all eight passengers were successfully rescued.
The sad spectacle of a homemade cable car dangling precariously 600 feet above a ravine with six children stuck in it riveted the nation and the world at large. Mainstream media crews trained their sights on the incident and churned out any and all content they could get their hands on, most of it sourced from the social media.
The social media on its part was a deeply divided place as always, with an array of actors eager to piggy-back their own agenda, splicing their own messages into the bona fide content and spinning the incident any which way.
This polarisation only increased after the marathon rescue effort succeeded against all odds – this time over the credit for its success. In particular, a section of social and mainstream media was hell bent on painting the military’s involvement in the operation as insubstantial.
Their zeal was matched by another section of opinion eager to credit the military wholly and solely for the feat. For the common hack, all was confusion, not least because both sides had plenty of newsbytes and imagery beamed from the site of the incident to support their respective narratives.
The dust has since settled over the matter and a clearer picture has emerged – which is prettier than many of us would imagine: The Battagram rescue was a holistic effort integrating all elements of national power including the civil administration, military, private sector, and the local civil society.
The deputy commissioner helped coordinate the effort, helping bring in experts from a top zipline company based in Swat; the Army Aviation helicopters quickly flew those experts to the site in addition to rescuing one student early on and delivering food and water to those trapped in the dangling dolly. Locals chipped in with the rescue effort in their own way.
The moral of the story is that in the final reckoning, unity was the charm that helped the nation rise above this challenge. The story is nicely recapped by the pictures shared by Caretaker Prime Minister Anwar ul Haq Kakar after he visited Allai the other day to honour those involved in the rescue effort and to acknowledge the bravery of the children and adults stuck in the malfunctioning dolly.
We have put together a collage of some of the images shared by the caretaker prime minister for the featured image used with this piece.
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