Kya Khabar?

It is all very well – even satisfying in a perverse kind of way – lampooning all and sundry, criticising their foibles, but it is always useful to stop occasionally and take a good hard look at oneself.

What is Pakistan coming to? It is in dire straits. If you cannot see this you should either have your eyes examined or your brains, preferably both. I think our most dire crisis is loss of identity after 1971. From this arises lack of clarity and from that arise all our current problems. Even before 1971 we did suffer from acute identity confusion caused, I feel, by the ‘Objectives Resolution’ (have you ever heard of doing something first and determining why one did it two years later) because it was a major departure from Mr Jinnah’s visionary speech of August 11, 1947. What’s happened to us since is exactly what happens to those who don’t listen to their doctor and hand themselves over to quacks and voodoo artists. But at least there was then a universal excitement about the challenges of turning a new country into a nation and making it work.

Even after 1971 there were many simpletons who thought that now that the ‘millstone’ of East Pakistan was gone we would make a real go of what was left. Bhutto soon put paid to that one-dimensional notion.

I was very young then, but when Yahya and Bhutto were busy tearing Pakistan apart, I felt that if we lost East Pakistan we would lose our identity with it too. Hardly any of my Pakistani peers at Cambridge agreed, nor those much older, the first supposedly more intelligent and the latter supposedly much wiser. With hindsight I think that my peers couldn’t see clearly because they had romanticised notions of a socialist revolution: it was the age of Che Guevara after all and the ethos of Cambridge was immersed in it and to them Bhutto was a positive revolutionary, while the still mentally colonised older lot saw every panacea in western political and social constructs. I don’t blame my peers: theirs was a cry against US hegemony. I could see not because of superior intelligence or wisdom (at that age one hardly has any) but simply because I had been lucky to live in East Pakistan for six years as a child and loved Bengal and the Bengalis. Neither was I in thrall of Bhutto because I had seen a lot of the gentleman when he was my father’s friend during the Ayub era.

My fear came to pass. No matter. Get on with it. We are not the first people to have lost part of their country (India did) and got over it by forging a new identity. India did that too. In this search we changed many colours, from dominion to republic to military state to our first democratic elections under a military government, to civil wars by not respecting the aspirations of people, losing a war and half our country, to Islamic socialism, to a damaging and hypocritical religious interpretation by a general with some mullahs and America in cahoots, to a decade of sham democracy, to another spell of army rule and quasi democracy, to what we have today. During all this we were ruled under fours basic laws one after another: the British India Act of 1935 and three constitutions of 1956, 1962 and 1973, all of which deceitfully had Pakistan as an ‘Islamic Republic’ when in truth it is neither Islamic nor a republic.

We have been going round in circles but hardly any can see that after 64 years we are standing not at the starting post but way behind it. Pathetic. That is why I cannot understand people who on meeting or phoning you, ask: Kya Khabar – “What news?” The news is that there is no news. The dust hanging is much ado about nothing, raised by our going round in circles (there are still people who are yet again pining for an army takeover). That’s the news: pathetic, pitiable, dismal and a thousand times wretched and shameless. It’s nothing short of denying God’s gift and His munificence. What a sad lot we are, happy only with words, words and more words.

When we are foggy about who we are (or even why we are) we have no touchstone of our own. So we shamelessly adopt another’s touchstone and try and make it ours, as if it carries our genes. The British touchstone that we adopted is fine for Britain in its historical context. Our historical context is different. This led us to hypocrisy before and after 1971 – calling ourselves an ‘Islamic Republic’ in the constitution but trying to cast ourselves in an alien philosophical firmament in practice.

What has happened to us in the meantime? Terrorism, local and foreign, state and non-state, is rampant. Our basic law doesn’t work. There is no governance, not even a semblance of government, just a fiction. The treasury is bankrupt. Unqualified people are manning key posts. Corruption has broken all records. Many legislators are crooks and an embarrassing some hold fake education degrees. The country is indebted to the gills and begging for more. Inflation is rife. There is no energy and no jobs. The people are uneducated and illiterate, even most of those that pass off for ‘educated’. Population growth is the highest in the world, a time bomb getting ready to go off in 20 to 30 years, when man will start eating man. There is no justice. There is no security. No public transport with even trains and planes diminishing by the hour. The day is virtually upon us when to go from Karachi to Islamabad or Lahore one will have to go via Dubai and catch a connection, and not on PIA. People’s stake in Pakistan has been lost, with large swathes wanting to opt out. Politicians and ‘intellectuals’ peddle out all our known ills that they intend to cure but neither do they tell us how nor who has the will and capacity to do so. Ours is a totally dis-balanced society, lack adl.

The relevant question would be: how are we best known? Say ‘Pakistan’ to foreigners and what are the images that immediately come to their minds? Terrorism. American drone-bombings. Cold-blooded murders. Kidnapping. Wanton bombings. Turmoil is all over, with the world’s largest internal and external refugee problem. Floods. Earthquakes. Bankruptcy. Begging bowl. Dishonesty. Gender inequality. Obscurantism. Drugs. Guns… Is there anything positive?

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