The wars that Pakistan has yet to fight

Time to initiate a concerted effort to untangle us from the destructive espousals of our past

This pockmarked light, this night-stricken dawn

Not a dawn that we had waited for

That we had yearned for

And set out hoping that we’ll meet somewhere

Across the expanse of the sky, where the stars come to rest

And somewhere this slow-paced night shall embrace its shores

Somewhere shall anchor this grief-stricken boat

Faiz Ahmad Faiz,

Subh-e-Azaadi

During the course of the sixty-six years that Pakistan has been in existence as a free country, it has barely begun to recognise the challenges that it faces and the wars that it’ll have to win to translate its independence into any genuine freedom.

To date, the country, ruled by corrupt, egoistic and inept leaders both of the civil and military denominations have led it along a path that has generated contentious new controversies together with perpetuating the old ones. Addressing the first constituent assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, the thought that seemed to occupy the mind of the Quaid was to transform a newly-born country into a progressive and egalitarian society banishing the prospect of any division on the basis of religion, ethnicity, social status, caste, colour or creed. His words were clear, candid and emphatic: “We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State…Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time 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”.

Sixty-six years hence, Pakistan has degenerated into becoming just the opposite of what was envisioned. The interior minister, after being in office for close to 100 days, is still found struggling to devise a national security paradigm and formulate an appropriate strategy to implement it. He moans endlessly that the “war on terror” was thrust on the country by a dictator, but “saving Pakistan from death and destruction had now become our war”. A smart coinage of words, but it cannot hide the weakness and duality of a political leadership that, boasting of an “all out war” against the militants, wants to persist with its softness on terror because of political considerations. The interior minister also spoke of a big “if” for all this to happen: the “if” of a national consensus reached at the multi-party conference that may be held sometime later this month.

The war that Pakistan faces today – the war against terror – is the by-product of decades of sinful inactivity and blatant complicity of the rulers with the forces of evil that resulted in a failure to launch the country into the enlightened orbit envisioned by the Quaid. Instead, it totters on the brink of extinction at the hands of terrorists and militants who are sponsored by the very forces that the Quaid had cautioned the country and its people against. These forces represent religiosity, bigotry, sectarianism and obscurantism and work by dividing the country into bits and pieces promoting a petty and retrogressive agenda that is vociferously advertised from countless pulpits and madrassas. Overstretched on all fronts, this is a war that the country is literally consumed with as the self-promoting leaders, lacking in capacity, capability and commitment, continue to enact dramas chasing untenable convergence with heterogeneous interest-groups and hate-puking religious militias.

This is one war that Pakistan could have avoided if it had started its journey along an enlightened path early on and set itself on course to initiating the more urgent wars in the field of education, enlightenment, population control, elimination of poverty and deprivation and focussing on economic uplift particularly of the underprivileged. That did not happen and the fear is that it is not likely to happen anytime soon as the leaderships across the divide remain completely insensitive to the destruction that has already been caused and which each one of them has contributed to in no small measure. They remain stuck in their delusional thought processes as if they were the very saviours come to lead an enslaved people to salvation. They remain embedded in their own grandiose egos and morbid predilections with a dominant objective to work to the exclusion of others. The supremacy syndrome remains dominant without even the basic ability to comprehend what it entails and what it endangers.

The presumption that drives all these leaders is their perceived invincibility. In the process, they assume a role that is well beyond what they have the capacity to understand or assimilate, much less relate to. In his classic “The Social Contract”, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes under the title “The Death of the Body Politic”: “Such is the natural and inevitable tendency of the best constitutional governments. If Sparta and Rome perished, what state can hope to last forever? If we wish, then, to set up a lasting constitution, let us not dream of making it eternal. We can succeed if we avoid attempting the impossible and flattering ourselves that we can give to the work of man a durability that does not belong to human things”. Now, discuss this with our leaders in command today and one would get unexplainable blanks in response. May be the servile and criminally-politicised retinue of bureaucrats could intervene to coin a meaning that would suit their own self-serving objectives – as would inevitably happen – which would be in sharp conflict with the inherent principles by which the state and its institutions should function!

The issue is with what we have done instead of what we should have done and our inability to rectify the faults. We should have laid the foundations of an enlightened and progressive polity. Instead we coined the Objectives Resolution making it the preamble of the constitution. We should have launched multi-pronged wars against illiteracy, poverty, hunger and inhuman social evils. Instead, we pushed these back and occupied ourselves with trivialities like how best to stay in power the longest and how best to corrupt the entire spectrum of governance and the vast array of its instruments. We should have eliminated feudalism as all enlightened societies have done. Instead, we worked on devising ever more humiliating ways to embrace its practitioners in mutually-beneficial contracts. In spite of their draconian conduct, they continue to occupy all echelons of power proclaiming saleable allegiance to the most corrupt of the community of rulers. Once out of favour, the same allegiance would conveniently shift to the next incumbent irrespective of his or her sins. It is like opening a bottle of worms every time an effort is unfurled at improving the system and correcting its ills and shortcomings including revisiting some wrong decisions taken in the past. If the improvement is meant for bringing in public welfare and eliminating the gross distortions created in the religious and social realms, it is castigated as being against the ideological foundations of the state, whatever that means. We are congenitally afraid to touch it. But, if any such changes are aimed at further perpetuating the stranglehold of the ruling mafias and their attendant jokers, the same is touted as an historic step to improve governance and ensure the rights of the people. We are caught up in the act of our corruption in a manner that does not leave any avenues for improvement. We are inexorably stuck in our putrid mindsets.

We know the problems. We know about the wars that we need to fight. We also know the ways this can be done, but we don’t do it. We refuse to initiate an effort that would untangle us from the destructive espousals of our past. We are afraid, mortally afraid. We are afraid of the mafias, the fear merchants who drive our lives. We are consigned to their vice-like grip. We think we are nobodies, we cannot do much. We think politics is dirty. It is not meant for the educated and the enlightened. We are willing to remain eternally subservient to the edict of the unenlightened and the obscurantist. That’s where we’re likely to reside as these criminal mafias continue to define the charter of this country which, forever, shall be dripping in the sweat and blood of the down-trodden and soaked in brutal and merciless regression:

This pockmarked light, this night-stricken dawn

Not a dawn that we had waited for

That we had hoped for

The writer is a political strategist. He can be reached at [email protected]