On bombs and parliament

Twitter-world, I’ve realised, is a fun place. It allows people to put their feet, hands, and any other part of the human anatomy into their mouths, all within the extremely reasonable space of 140 characters, and usually with inflammatory consequences. This is exactly what a certain young orthodontist-cum-blogger-cum-PTI activist managed to do yesterday evening. In his allocated 140 characters, said activist conveyed his displeasure upon hearing that a plan to attack parliament had been foiled. Being a man of few, and mostly incoherent words, he exhibited his annoyance by repeatedly uttering the most common synonym for human excrement, and telling the world at large that the counter-factual i.e., parliament being bombed, would’ve been a dream come true.
We were later told that this was a joke.
Rather than apologise for his terrible and frankly, morbid sense of humor, this fellow repeatedly uttered there was nothing wrong with what he’d said. Ultimately, after much persuasion, we were on the receiving end of a half-hearted clarification that focused more on our inability to ‘get’ the joke, as opposed to any wrongdoing on his part. Not to jump to hasty conclusions or anything, but after this ‘clarification’, one cannot be faulted for thinking that this young member of the PTI actually enjoys having his foot in his mouth.
The reaction to his comments was fairly predictable. A sizeable contingent of his party’s supporters immediately got the punch line, (I suppose party discipline requires sharing a sense of humor as well) and were ‘LOL-ing’, ‘ROTFL-ing’, and indulging in other such animated acts. Another set of people were outraged by the thought that someone would find the killing of parliamentarians a) humorous, or b) a dream come true.
Okay, so maybe I’m reading too much into it. It was a silly thing to say, and to be fair, it was said on the one medium most suitable for nonsense. But despite my best efforts, I can’t seem to look past the reality that there are people out there – not necessarily this dentist or other people from Imran Khan’s party – who genuinely think that Pakistan’s problems can be solved by eliminating a fixed number of individuals currently occupying high-offices in the country. Get them out of the picture, and things will be fine. It’s a frighteningly simple solution that to some minds makes perfect sense.
Politicians are hated the world over, in all cultures, in almost every country. Part of this hatred stems from their own antics, and part of it from the very nature of their job – to run things for the rest of us. Specific to the case of Pakistan though, the people who harbour such sentiment do so because of two reasons. Firstly, they feel there are others who can do a better job – like Imran Khan instead of Asif Ali Zardari, or xyz technocrat instead of some minister, or in some cases, themselves instead of their MNA/MPA. The second reason is more abstract, and has everything to do with their idealised notion of Pakistan, and what it means to do a ‘better job’ running this country.
Every person living in this country has some idea of what Pakistan should be like. Some want a secular state, others want an Islamic state. Some want lower petrol prices, others want higher support prices. Some, a very small bunch, want a classless society, others want to enjoy their wealth with no transgressions. All of these voices express themselves in some way or another and each voice, by its very nature, attempts to come across as the real deal. A subset within these idealised notion-holders has come to terms with the idea of a compromised utopia and a shared political process – either by sheer exhaustion/coercion or by choice. Another subset, however, is still struggling to grasp the idea of this shared process. To them, sharing is messy, sharing results in riff-raff rising up to the top, sharing means compromising on the national interest.
This last sentiment, apart from being patronising and parochial, is also illegal and historically speaking, has resulted in the derailment of a shared political process. On closer examination, it would be fair to assume that the root of all of this patronising from the idea that a ‘greater good’ or what we call the ‘national interest’ can be defined in abstraction from the realities of the country itself. Kalabagh dam, in its role as the love child of national interest sorts, is one very good example of this phenomenon.
The truth, and it will remain so whether some of us like it or not, is that two of the realities of this country are its heterogeneous makeup and a constitutionally ordained democratic framework. Any solution to our problems, and there are many of the latter to go around, needs to come from within the process itself. And contrary to what some might think, bombing parliament (sic), or getting rid of the president (by hook or by crook), will achieve nothing.

The writer blogs at http://recycled-thought.blogspot.com. Email him at [email protected], or send a tweet @umairjav