Winston Churchill was against granting independence to India and Pakistan just yet. They are not ready for it, he argued. On the eve of independence, he wrote:
Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all leaders will be of low caliber and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India and Pakistan will be lost in political squabbles. A day would come when even air and water would be taxed.
Was Churchill right? Young Ammar Belal the fashion designer told us in an interview what it is like 63 years later. Asked, How do you characterize the Pakistani way of doing business? he replied, Survival in the Gaza Strip. Well put Sir, very well put indeed. However, if you think things are dire now, you aint seen nothin yet. You do not know how bad it will will, not can.
We of this benighted subcontinent have all worked overtime to prove old Winston right, with Pakistan leading the field. As for India, all I can say is that the India that propaganda presents to us is an illusion, quite another country from the reality on the ground. The pipedream purveyed is that it is equal or even second to China. Really? With 76 percent of its people living in poverty, and growing? What price then the story of its great economic success told in cold statistics? What has it done for its people? Pakistan is not far behind with 74 percent living in poverty and 50 percent in abject poverty, and growing too. So let us make a dish fit for a pauper out of all the reports on the economy that only underline their authors alienation from reality. At least the hungry will have something to eat; paper is, after all, a vegetable. Pakistan has the added distinction of becoming Americas vassal, its sovereignty nothing more than symbols like a flag, a national anthem, a parliament house, palatial residences for its president and the prime minister and a Supreme Court building whose only distinction is that it could win an architectural competition.
Some writers often trot out a statement they attribute to the Quaid-e-Azam, that each successive government of Pakistan will be worse than its predecessor. Very Churchillian, but frankly, I cannot believe how such an intelligent man could have made such a preposterous statement, for it immediately begs two question:
If you already knew this, Sir, why didnt you do something about it, like quickly make Pakistan a constitution signed and authenticated by you? It would have been very difficult for any subsequent parliament to mutilate, leave alone abrogate. You had enough time to prepare the document before Pakistans inception. It would have been debated for three months in the constituent assembly that we inherited and then passed.
The second and more difficult question is: If you already knew this, Sir, why did you make Pakistan in the first place? Was it not the idea that those Muslims of India who lived in Pakistan would be better off? How could that be possible if you already knew that we would have progressively deteriorating leaders and governments?
I find it difficult to believe that Jinnah could have made such a stupid and callous statement and would like to know where he did so and when. Otherwise, those who purvey this are committing defamation and calumny.
Rascals, rogues, freebooters; leaders of low caliber and men of straw with sweet tongues and silly hearts we have had many. They have always fought amongst themselves and indulged in petty political squabbles but when survival or some petty political advantage so demands, they become bedfellows. They have plundered and looted the country no less than the British coloniser did. They are the colonisers successors and come from the same mould forged by Macaulay that created a small class of Indians who would be British in every respect except for the colour of their skins, to act as their agents to exploit the native and plunder the country. They remain agents of the new colonizer America, now called hegemon in modern political jargon, exploiting their people to the hilt, allowing them to be bombed, mindlessly following IMF-World Bank nostrums to economically colonize us to the point where we have mortgaged our childrens futures and our countrys soul. They could never tell the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. The time for delicacy has gone: today our government is totally and irrevocably bankrupt, our people are hurtling into ever-increasing poverty, governance is absent because the government is absent, institution is preying upon institution, security is singularly absent and there is a free-for-all. Why labour the point: everyone knows about it.
With hopelessness piled upon frustration, no wonder there are angry people who criticise the likes of me who advocate that the system be allowed to proceed unhindered so that the people have time to learn. You pseudo armchair intellectual with your amply full belly can say that, while more and more people will descend into greater wretchedness and want while your precious learning process goes on. I not only sympathize with this sentiment, at one level I agree with it. But what is the alternative? That my understandably frustrated critics do not say. You only abort the process of a system when you have not only something better to replace it with but as importantly the means to implement it. What could the alternatives be? Certainly not another bout of army rule. We have to understand that the military is a part of the small establishment that benefits from this system and the anti-people status quo that it spawns. When it takes over, it does so to save the status quo and protect the benefits and privileges of the ruling class. It does not know any better. To expect revolution from a coup is to not understand either. A revolution upturns the existing status quo; a coup d etat is literally a hit against the State that happens to save the status quo. They are two diametrically opposed things.
Look at past coups, even civilian ones, that claimed to be revolution. Lenins revolution was a coup by a minority (Bolsheviks) against the majority (Mensheviks). It failed and left the Russian people and those of their empire in no better a condition than they were in before. Colonel Nasser claimed a revolution of Arab socialism that would create a greater Arab union that he called the United Arab Republic. Decide for yourself. Colonel Gaddafi claimed that his coup was a revolution and even made it seem so by standing up to America for many years; today he has totally capitulated. To my mind, only three revolutions in modern times have been genuine: the Cuban, but poverty is still rife there, except for an excellent medical service. The Iranian, too early to tell, but while it stands up to Americas bullying bravely its people are no better off, in danger of getting mired in obscurantism rather than a dynamic, modern ideology. The Chinese that has worked beautifully, has taken the greatest number of people out of hunger and poverty in the shortest time and made China into a growing economic and military powerhouse that is now challenging Americas sole superpower hegemony.
Do we have the possibility of a genuine revolution on our radar screens? Im afraid not, unless you consider the polyglot that is called the Pakistani Taliban revolutionaries. I do not. We will only descend into obscurant religious warlordism.
But remember one thing: all this talk about Pakistan being a failed or a failing state is just so much claptrap. Actually, we are a predator state. About that later.
The writer is a political analyst.
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