Snakes and Ladders

Don’t get too excited, but deliverance could be at hand. The emphasis is on the word ‘could’ because bad judgment and bad luck have been our bane. What we are witnessing today is not so much politicians and political parties destroying one another but the political system destroying itself. It is part of the Great Political Process driven by the forces of history that fashion destinies – of people, nations, states and countries. It’s called evolution.

Far better than the system being destroyed by force unless the destroyers themselves are rooted in a clear, coherent, modern and doable ideology that takes people forward. If not, the hated destroyed turn into instant martyrs and are given another lease of life to return. This has been the lot of Pakistan since inception. There is no law of man or God that says that it will not go on forever. Tell me: have the people of this benighted subcontinent of ours ever known anything but inequity, poverty, privation and utter degradation? The worry is that in the process Pakistan could also be destroyed: it has broken once already. There is none better than the natural way to overturn the status quo. If you do, you can then proudly say that you have brought about a real revolution.

Take Pakistani politics to be a game of chess. When Zulfiqar Mirza detonated, he overturned the chessboard and a tiger was let out of the bag. Good. Since a politician has overturned the chessboard, the pieces on the floor won’t become instant martyrs and return to destroy us again. The new game has to be three-dimensional chess – local, regional and global – with new pieces and new players. Any bets?

More appropriate to our current politics is ‘Snakes and Ladders’ – our politicians the snakes, the ladders for their upward mobility. When Mirza suddenly changed the rules, the snakes started swallowing one another. Some started eating themselves tail first. The ladders became one-way traffic. The snakes-not-swallowed started slithering down. Self-annihilation is far better than forced annihilation, for then you turn snakes into instant martyrs.

Have you ever seen hyenas fighting over a kill – now snapping; now snarling; now tearing the kill apart – and laughing? That’s the most appropriate analogy. The hyenas are our politicians. The kill is our decrepit political system. The kill is the failed constitution. The kill could be Pakistan one day. What could be better than hyenas killing one another instead of someone having to kill them? For if you do you turn hyenas into instant martyrs. The bleeding hearts gang will start bleeding you; the animal rights lot would fry your brains. The same hyenas (or their little hyenas) would return to kill, snap, snarl and tear apart again – and laugh. Won’t be easy to finish them off. Best that they kill one another to extinction.

The kill is also our land, our country. Our land is our original common mother. She is a unique mother, one of a kind, for unlike our human mother, our land is the mother into whose womb we return. When people commit matricide, it is terribly sad because it is terribly abnormal. It is tantamount to denying one’s existence. Are we sane?

Please stop. Stop your pretence and fake piety. “You the people” are more responsible for this matricide than the political hyenas because you made them kings of your jungle. Now you are getting your just desserts for being so in thrall of them, worshiping them and making them into demigods, dead or alive. I’m not saying ‘we’ because I never had faith in this alien political system foisted on us by still mentally colonised minds meant not really for democracy but to fortify an iniquitous, vicious status quo that keeps a small ruling cabal with a primitive mindset in power and the rest of humanity in penury. If we are to progress and improve the human condition, then tribalism-feudalism must go and take the tribal-feudal mindset with it.

Anyone with a decolonised mind would totally disagree with those who extol this iniquity-gendering alien system hidden behind a mask of ‘democracy’, for they are the ones who benefit from it. Those who do ‘good works’ for charity – our begums and their balls – don’t realise that while they may alleviate suffering a little, they are unwittingly providing cover for inequity. “Pakistanis are the most charitable people in the world” and their consciences are salved. You cannot buy a place in Heaven. You have to earn it by easing the suffering of not some human beings but by ending the suffering of humanity at large. If only they would spend half the time that they do on ‘good works’ they would help overthrow this man-eating status quo. In the end, what is right will always prevail, however long it might take and however much the suffering in the interim.

In this backdrop, shouldn’t it be irrelevant whether Zulfiqar Mirza self-detonated or was detonated? Is he alone or is he part of a ‘larger plan’. Who could be behind the larger plan? Does it matter? Does it really? It’s like wondering today why Mr Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan and Mr Nehru rejected it. What is done is done, no matter how or why. We have to move on – learn from the past, live in the present and work for a better future.

Whether Mirza detonated or self-detonated is of little concern to the millions who worry every day about how to feed their children. For God’s sake, they don’t even know who Zulfikar Mirza is; they know what a stale piece of bread is. The question matters only to empty-headed overfed drawing room chatterers with mountains of food liberally washed down with the ‘demon in the bottle’ fermenting in their bellies. Empty of intellect and overflowing with chatter, they compete over who was the first to know, who has real ‘insider’ information, which General told him what, little realising that anything told to the irrelevant by a real insider could only be to spread disinformation or to use them. No real insider worth his salt (and there are only a handful) would ever waste his time with chatterers leave alone reveal secrets to them. Their chattering never stops. Sad are the people who listen to it.

Mirza has been a game changer. Sometimes the most unlikely people unwittingly change the course of history. Good for him.

The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at [email protected]