Today is our Independence Day. Pakistan Zindabad – Long Live Pakistan! To have survived 63 years, more “moth eaten” than at birth, is a great achievement indeed, especially in the face of so many problems within and without, so much leadership failure, so much callousness. It’s called resilience.
Achievements there are many, but good achievements precious few. For starters, we broke Jinnah’s Pakistan in 1971 – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto named the leftover ‘New Pakistan’. To be perverse, the anniversary we celebrate today is the 40th anniversary of Bhutto’s Pakistan. Was Bhutto solely responsible? Certainly not! He was responsible in part. Most responsible was President General Yahya Khan. More too was Sheikh Mujib, for he was prime minister elect but failed to reassure people and forge unity. So too was the rest of the leadership – and a media egging on the perfidy. But it was “we the people” who were most responsible, we who elected treacherous, deceitful and dishonest leaders, we who celebrated when the “fat and flabby generals” attacked their own country and lamented when we lost the ensuing war to India but learned no lessons. Bhutto lost little time in attacking Balochistan and we raised not a cry.
It was the rump, an assembly that became a minority after the majority seceded, that gave us our precious 1973 constitution crafted to perpetuate the iniquitous status quo defined by feudalism and tribalism, rived with inequity and hypocrisy – asserting that Pakistan is an Islamic state while doing most things un-Islamic. It had no sanction not only because it was a minority but also because it was elected in another country. What then the legitimacy of our constitution, what its ‘sanctity’? That it is a ‘consensus’ constitution? Consensus of leftovers? Forsooth.
Our minds remain colonised. Our belief is that everything Western is everything good. While Western social, economic, political and cultural constructs have been good for the West – thus far – they have not all necessarily been for us. Today, they too have run their course. Times change. Failure to change with the times causes ideologies to run out of time. The due date of Western ‘liberal’ ‘democratic’ capitalism has arrived. This ideological obsolescence is at the root of the turmoil in the West today and the rest of the world with its deep economic linkages with it. It happened to Soviet communism and to the Muslims long ago: hubris and decadence hinder ideological evolution relevant to changing times.
Our root problem is ideological stagnation – while we profess the Islamic ideology, we neither understand it nor do ijtehad to adjust it to the times. Sometimes, I even feel that we don’t even mean it. We remain rooted in a distant past. We have lost our intellectual courage to do ijtehad and have abdicated our thinking to the ill-qualified de facto ‘scholar’ who is nothing but a pulpit haranguer. Where is the genuine mujtahid qualified to do ijtehad, making decisions in Islamic law (sharia) by personal effort (jihad or struggle), independently of any school (madhhab) of jurisprudence (fiqh), as opposed to taqlid, which is copying or obeying without question. We have bartered ijtehad for taqlid. What else is loss of Faith? Loss of Faith is loss of a community’s ideological compass.
I am quite fed up of wiseacres parroting on that we don’t have any consensus or ijma on anything. They trot out meaningless clichés: “First Pakistan was a nation in search of a country; now Pakistan is a country in search of a nation.” They don’t even understand the difference between nation, state and country and use them interchangeably with great abandon. When you don’t respect yourself, why should others respect you? When you don’t use your minds and remain wedded to alien concepts, you remain forever colonised.
So while at the root of our confusion is ideological stagnation, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have consensus on many things. It is just that our intellectual leadership hasn’t developed the mind’s inner eye to see. Intellectual failure is our biggest failure, the prime cause of our ideological obsolescence that has found expression in political, economic and social failure.
Only those with sensitivity can hear the voices of consensus, sensitivity born of open minds and open hearts. Here are some of the issues on which we have consensus. It is neither exhaustive nor exclusive nor in order of precedence.
The right to adl, a balanced society based justice. Affordable food and nutrition, shelter and clothing, healthcare, free modern education with a uniform education system. Constant and significant improvement in the human condition, starting from the poorest. An egalitarian society in which all are equal before the law. Speedy justice, affordable, honest and blind. It is the state’s duty to protect the dignity of the citizen and the family, including and especially their reputation. Defamation that doesn’t serve the public good is wrong and it is the state’s Islamic duty to prevent it.
There is national consensus that our political system has failed because it continuously throws up bad governments and incompetent and corrupt leadership not mentally equipped to comprehend our malaise, forget find solutions. There is consensus that the levers of power should not be in the hands of an inept, primitive and rapacious few at the cost of the many. That there is need for a new political system that will produce the quality of government, governance and leadership capable of solving the country’s and the people’s problems, that can reclaim our lost pride by reclaiming our lost sovereignty.
There is national consensus that we should break free from America’s stranglehold. Live within our means and not in debt and usury. Exit from America’s ‘War on Terror’. Don’t allow America land routes for supplies. Don’t allow America to kill our people with impunity – Hellfire missiles fired from cowardly drones, leave alone give them airbases. Out American mercenary killers – out, out, out – all of them and at once. No one-sided relationships but only those that are also in our interest – or nothing.
To kick start this change, people are prepared to make sacrifices: that’s easy, because except for a charmed few the people have precious little to sacrifice. This list is not even the half of it. Pity that there is not yet a consensus on lowering population growth, without which the best laid plans of mice and men will come to naught.
Great that consensus is growing that Pakistan’s touchstone should be Mr. Jinnah’s speech of August 11, 1947 that is our real ‘Declaration of Independence’ and should be the preamble of our constitution.
“You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state… We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state… I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in due course Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”
Follow this and it will be zindabad. Follow the obscurant and reap the whirlwind.
The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at humayun.gauhar786@gmail.com