No place left in the country for a measure of decency
It is not fiction. It is not hyperbole. It is not a pack of semantics. It does not simply exist in one’s deranged imagination. It is also not the manifestation of any hallucinatory trip. It is here, right in front of all of us. The antics of this bizarre government comprising alleged criminals, murderers, looters, gangsters and a host of woeful aberrations are distinguished only by the extent of their corruption, gross incompetence and arrogant defiance of the judiciary and the rule of law. An absolutely, unbelievably abhorrent spectacle!
There is no shame. All this is being wantonly enacted in broad daylight. Victory signs are shown when being handcuffed. Lies are being told in public. Facts are being twisted openly. Achievements are being shamelessly concocted. Probing questions are being shunned. Honest investigators are being eliminated. Thieves and looters are being patronised. Criminal mafias are being promoted and perpetuated. National interests and sovereignty are being compromised. Energy is scarce. Utilities needed for borderline survival are being rendered inaccessible to human reach. Banks are being looted and national coffers emptied. Contracts are being awarded to corrupt front men in a manner that cannot stand the test of scrutiny. Institutions are being liquidated. There is no strategy to fight the demons of terrorism and militancy. There is no security for the common people who are being butchered in the dozens on a daily basis. The country has been reduced to a string of no-go areas being controlled, among ordinary street criminals, by some coalition partners also who routinely indulged in politics of extortion and murder. No one is safe. Leaving home, no one knows whether they would return unscathed from the gangs ruling the streets.
If the going gets really tough, as it did in case of the SC order to arrest some top bunglers of the government including the prime minister, the goons are let loose on investigators to have them hung by the ceiling fan. The state agencies are encouraged, spearheaded by that inimitable interior minister, to help criminals escape the clutches of law using official vehicles and means. Erroneous and deceptive briefs are prepared and submitted for decision-making purposes to facilitate the looting of the state exchequer. Crooks and cronies are hoisted at all critical positions to sponge off the state institutions.
This is the revenge of democracy. It was promised to us and we have it. We are not supposed to protest. Instead, we are supposed to savour it and make arrangements to vote in the same criminals, or their close kith and kin who may be even more adept at the Machiavellian art of governance, to give us all the next ‘healthy’ dose of this revenge.
We get it because we don’t protest. We get it because we are always scheming to become partners of the wily system that is being practised in the country. We suffer because we have lost our instinct to stand up for the right cause. We are humiliated because we have lost our courage and our ability to resist. We have become complicit in being led up a garden-path that inevitably perches us atop a precipice with nothing but a steep fall in front of us. We have become pawns in the hands of criminal manipulators who use us when needed and then dump us in some forsaken corner in gunny bags cut into bits and pieces.
But we don’t learn. We are somehow convinced that success comes only to criminals and that we all have to become one to get anywhere. So we try to adopt the ways of the corrupt, the gangsters and the murderers. The more effort we put in, the deeper we sink in the quagmire without a way out. But success still evades us because we are only to be ‘used’. We will never get the reins to guide or control. Witnesses are brutally and systematically eliminated so that there is no one left to prove a murder. With gangsters calling the shots, there is hardly a place left in the country for a measure of decency.
The only occupation that is perceived to offer opportunities to prosper is crime. If one hopes to get anywhere, the preferred way to go is to become part of a mafia. The more ‘criminal’ and the more ‘powerful’ the mafia, the more chances one has to succeed! For whatever may still be left, nepotism and patronising have been perfected to an art form.
With the brewing of frustrations, violence has increased alarmingly. There are degrading symptoms visible all around us. Tolerance and peaceful co-existence are values of the past. The society is militantly divided along religious, ethnic, social and cultural lines and the chasm seems insurmountable. We are willing, even eager to kill if anyone dares disagree with what we choose to state. We stand on the pulpit without the knowledge and learning of being a leader. We sit in the parliament without the ability and comprehension to legislate. We are part of the executive without the honesty, ability and the commitment to take decisions fearlessly. We are just about everything without being anything:
We are the hollow men
We are stuffed men
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
—T S Eliot
Religion has become a vehicle of spreading division rather than bringing the scattered tribes together. It is used as a convenient tool to distort history and fabricate half-truths that we all are supposed to believe. It is exploited as an instrument to exterminate those who disagree. It is also manipulated as a convenient cover to hide despicable crimes. Tragically, the voice from the pulpit is a voice of ignorance and obscurantism. This is the kind of stuff that an increasing number of madrassas are dishing out without a break. Their graduates are all among us waiting for their chance to take over and use their swords with abandon. Facing their onslaught, we would not even be a speck on the wall.
The writer is a political analyst. He can be reached at raoofhasan@hotmail.com