THE apparently self-inflicted death of a Pakistani activist left a vacuum in a society starving for creative public expression. But this was not an isolated act.

In contemporary Pakistan, the tragedy is also a metaphor for the larger constriction and self-destruction that has become a recurrent motif in our demographic, institutional and moral existence. In the words of sociologist Emile Durkheim “the term ‘suicide’ applies to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from an act of the victim himself which he knows will produce this result”.

Suicide thus is not an act for humans alone and spans beyond the nearly 6,000 suicides that have been recorded in Pakistan in the past three years. It extends beyond the risk factors of being male, unemployed and under 40 which have been defined in studies as forming the largest group of those at risk. It even goes beyond the men willingly donning explosive vests in the hopes of achieving transcendent rewards after annihilating the lives of scores of innocent people. These literal iterations of suicide, though familiar, are only the most visible symbols of the deeper systemic self-destruction that has gripped Pakistan.

Demographically, Pakistan is already the sixth largest country in the world with a population of 170 million, 100 million of which is under 25. This ‘youth bulge’ which represents our failure to curtail fertility rates to under 2.5 per cent bodes disaster for the country. If our strained state resources are unable to provide services for existing populations, it is likely that they will also not be able to provide healthcare, sustainable economic projects or education for these future generations. Despite knowing this, our failure as a nation to prioritise reducing the size of our families, suggests an act of demographic suicide, where we are committing ourselves to a perpetual youth bulge, which permanently means strained and inadequate basic services and an increasingly desperate and destroyed populace that continues to grow.

Pakistan’s economy is similarly afflicted with a host of systemic problems that curtail the state’s ability to lift the ordinary Pakistani out of poverty. The weak tax base, a result of the refusal to tax large agricultural landholdings of the feudal elite that dominate the government, leaves the state with little revenue to invest in industry. This means that the country is overly dependent on foreign investment, which due to the state’s inability to provide security simply does not come.

Democratic theorists predict that for citizens to become stakeholders in the political process and sustain liberal democracy, the average income per family has to be somewhere around $3,000 per capita. The average per capita income of the Pakistani family is stuck at $1,000 suggesting a long and arduous road ahead. Current forecasts put the economic growth rate at around 2.7 per cent which falls short of the seven per cent needed to sustain job creation for our growing population.

Demographic and economic challenges are not the only factors that have put Pakistan on a suicidal course. Pakistani institutions have in 60 years engaged in the most hedonistic rate of systemic adventurism. Despite this rate of experimenting with varying power arrangements, both of Pakistan’s major political parties have been unable to produce any new leadership in the past 20 years. The generation that grew up in the early 1980s is thus seeing the same faces of leaders and their sons paraded on television screens as heirs to the nation’s leadership.

Known as the world’s most corrupt, Pakistani institutions deliver next to nothing in terms of representation for the common man. The resultant leadership vacuum provides anti-establishment groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Jaish-i-Mohammad and Lashkar-i-Taiba with plenty of discontent, confusion and malaise which can be channelled into literal suicide. As a Taliban leader recently boasted, he has a number of young men willing to kill themselves for the promise of heaven.

Suicide thus is not simply the problem of the bomber who straps explosives to his body and walks into a crowded marketplace with hopes of heaven. Nor is it only the burden of individuals unable to watch the sufferings of their countrymen. Individual acts of self-destruction represent a sense of helplessness before a national path of self-destruction willingly adopted. A baffled world asks again and again how droves of Pakistani youth can reach such depths of desperation and hopelessness as to commit acts of wanton and random terror.

One answer lies in the national fate of Pakistan itself. Pakistan today is literally and figuratively a country that has strapped an explosive suicide vest to itself. The embrace of feudal hierarchies that perpetually ply their own interests before the rest of the nation, the failure to tax the richest in the country, the failure to curtail population growth with aggressive policies and the failure to rein in spending in the face of ever-rising debts create an explosive vest that threatens to destroy all within it.

The year 2009 saw 87 suicide attacks in Pakistan which killed nearly 1,300 people — a nearly 40 per cent increase from the previous year. There will be more suicides in the coming days, more young men will strap bombs to their bodies and destroy the lives of hundreds around them. The demographic, economic and institutional path that Pakistan is on has made suicide not simply a terrorist act or an incident of psychological and sociological distress. Instead suicide has become the metaphor for the historical reality of our nation, poised as it is with a gun to its temple and confronted with a choice.

The writer is an attorney and a director at Amnesty International, US.