O’ People

Time to call a spade a shovel?

And God said: “O’ people, you argue about what little you know. What will you argue about what you don’t know?”

The impatient ask for solutions, not just identifying problems: “No laments please, give us a quick fix.” Sorry, there is no magic wand. Your destiny is in your hands and you have to make it. Else stop bellyaching and start thinking of what you have done wrong to contribute to your multifaceted malaise. At the very least, you may have contributed by voting for the wrong guy or chasing shadows and alien nostrums. Time for the writer to call a spade a shovel.

What ought to be and what is are two different things. We have to first deal with reality (what is) and then try and translate what ought to be (wishes) into reality. I know of two possible solutions. There is no guarantee that either will work because how well a system does depends on those who craft it and those who practice it. The best of systems can be messed-up by the inadequate. When we Muslims have made a mess of God’s system, the chances of any man-made system are dim. Look at all the 57 Muslim majority countries and judge them by their human condition, the only meaningful measure. They all fail. Why do we create states except to improve the human condition starting from the poorest? We have to get our heads screwed on right instead of living in our glorious past, a lot of it mythical and legendary, else we have no future. God screwed our heads on right with his divine messages, but clerics of dizzying denominations unscrewed our heads and then screwed them back on wrong to get their business of peddling religion going. The ruler-cleric-judge combine hijacked faith, made churches and religions with myriad self-serving interpretations of god’s word and became its self-appointed custodians. Cleric-screwed people lapped up clerical nonsense dumbly. Those amongst us who became black and brown clones of their white colonisers were reprogrammed and mentally colonised and lapped up the colonisers’ political philosophies, ideologies, nostrums and humdrum too: confusion worse compounded. The intellectual wherewithal to sift the relevant in alien systems from the irrelevant was missing.

There are two solutions: revolution and evolution. Revolution requires first a catalyst; second, an agent of change; third designers of the new order.

None of our three branches of government is delivering – the parliament-legislature is paralysed, the executive is confused and the judiciary politicised. All are rived by mediocrity.

The catalyst is people rising in protest against deprivation and tyranny, venting their frustrations and taking control of their destinies by enabling the agent of change, which has historically almost always been the military or a revolutionary army. The system natural to animals, including man, has been rule of the fittest, the strongest, the last man standing – and after Islam and democracy, rule by the best. Our duty is to make rule by the best possible. Unlike those militaries that like to prolong their rule, the successful have first stabilised the situation, established security, enabled men of wisdom like America’s founding fathers to write a constitution, got the economy going and then withdrawn. The three big modern democracies – British, American and French – were preceded by war or civil war, an army general enabling change and then bowing out, to wit, Lt General Oliver Cromwell, Major General George Washington and General Charles de Gaulle. As agents of change militaries cannot craft the new order or become long-term rulers, else we are looking at another disaster. In tandem, the military’s first and foremost task is to establish security and then start economic development. Security comes first, economic development second, for without security there can be no investment. Hand-in-hand is the task to enable the making of a new constitution that will find legitimacy in an honest referendum, in practice and by delivery. If it stops delivering, even a constitution that was once legitimate loses legitimacy.

The designers of a new basic law or constitution can neither be the catalyst nor the agent of change. They have to be men and women of wisdom – philosophers, those with a sense and understanding of history, jurists, academics and ideologues. Such people are best equipped to craft a new, relevant and workable constitution and with it new pro-people legal, political and economic systems. Pakistan’s constitution has to dispense properly representative democracy based on the Divine dictum, “Choose from amongst yourselves and choose from amongst the best.” ‘Choose’ implies democracy. How to ensure that only the best stand for leadership is a tremendous challenge. Find such people if you can, both the framers of the constitution and the best who offer themselves for leadership. Start the search now and good luck.

Time is ripe for revolution – “the objective conditions on the ground are right” is the hackneyed saying. None of our three branches of government is delivering – the parliament-legislature is paralysed, the executive is confused and the judiciary politicised. All are rived by mediocrity. Police is on the run. Bureaucrats without constitutional protection have been reduced to personal servants of rulers. People are getting poorer. Education is spreading illiteracy. Healthcare is in the hands of quacks. Terrorism, criminality and lawlessness are rife. Governments are the largest mafias. Why go on?

Revolution requires leadership that can set the blood of slaves afire, pull down the citadels of the great, let the little sparrow engage the mighty falcon, burn every bushel and ear of grain that doesn’t feed the farmer. Iqbal has told you so. Revolution requires great faith, great effort, great commitment and great sacrifice because our enemies are humongous fiends. Revolution requires upturning the status quo and replacing it with a better one that leads to a continuous and significant improvement in the human condition.

That cannot be done without returning to our original social contract given by our founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah on August 11, 1947 in his speech to Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly and making a constitution based on it by making it the preamble. Pakistan has to be an ‘Islamic Welfare State’. It cannot take cover behind repugnancy clauses but clearly spell out the duties of an Islamic Welfare State, especially implementation of the rights and duties of god’s creation and the nature of its leadership. A new constitution based on Jinnah’s social contract requires balance in society, justice and equity in all walks of life, political and economic systems that deliver and lead to an equitable distribution of wealth. The god-given rights of humankind have to be assiduously guarded. The state’s and the citizen’s rights, duties and obligations towards one another have to be clearly spelled out. I cannot write in one article what an Islamic Welfare State ought to be. It will require a book. But I can leave you with this thought: the constitution of an Islamic Welfare State has to be continuously revolutionary, meaning it has to be dynamic to adjust to changing conditions. That is Ijtehad, one of the key pillars of Islam. If thought, culture, systems, laws and social relationships are frozen they soon ossify, the state falls behind and becomes backward.

The constitution of an Islamic Welfare State has to be continuously revolutionary, meaning it has to be dynamic to adjust to changing conditions.

At a time when the need is to save our state, letting societal evolution take its course is the apathetic option. We are too fragile to withstand the buffets of evolution. Evolution within this constitution and its systems will lead to terrible mutation. The monster has to be killed now.

I was a great proponent of the evolutionary option after we had yet another shot at ‘democracy’ in 2008, but now we are in such a friable state that action is the imperative. Evolution certainly causes movement because change is constant, but whether that movement is progressive or regressive is moot. Our situation is so bad that mutation, not evolution, will remain our lot. We mutated when we lost East Pakistan. Why, we have mutated the British parliamentary system and the British India Act, 1935. So far our evolutionary trend has been backward and mutant, though the complacent, the apathetic and wishful thinkers comfort themselves with hackneyed clichés that stick in the gullet, like, “It’s darkest before dawn”. I prefer “calm before the storm”.

The British colonisation of India was a super storm: that is what happens to an apathetic people who become agents of the enemy to settle their own petty rivalries and then become the coloniser’s stooges to gain favours. So apathetic are we still, so much like the English-Indians that Macaulay helped engineer, that we remain mentally colonised. Europe did it by separating the cleric from statecraft followed by education, letting a hundred thoughts contend, a hundred flowers bloom, while we remained mired in cuisine, poetry, dance, music, architecture and gardening for expression. No bad thing, but there is more to life, like education, inquiry and research. Oh, and not to forget the mullah who has become a massive sore on statecraft.

I digress, which is what happens when the mind is on ‘roam’. Evolution is long and painful. People die, states vanish. The land and the people on it remain of course, but they take on different geographic forms, not always for the better. So take your pick between revolution and evolution and tell the naysayers that revolution is a part of evolution too.

During our evolution we lost half the country, we have been ruled under four illegitimate constitutions, our industrial sector was destroyed, feudalism stagnated agriculture while the population exploded.

To save Pakistan and thereby yourselves, you the people have to act as catalysts to enable revolution. Without the people’s support all you get are military coups because soldiers are sworn to save their countries before their constitutions. Coups eventually take us back to square one as we have seen. Thus, too, you the people have to support every protest movement for change regardless of whether or not you like its leaders, from the so far small efforts of Atiya Khan in Karachi, to the MQM to Tahir ul Qadiri. Then and only then will we the people be able to bring permanent revolution, security and economic and human advancement.