A burden of unbearable pain and grief
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Frederic Bastiat
I am also reminded of Fredrick Douglass who, while describing such a situation, went on to proposing the singular option to deal with it:
“Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But, it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.”
Pakistan stands at the crossroads. On the one hand, the rulers have actually created a haven for themselves and are standing guard threateningly to further enhance their illicit gains secured through a criminal manipulation of the system and its institutions. On the other hand, people are crumbling under the increasing weight of their meagre existence. This is made worse by the multi-faceted humiliation they have to endure at the hands of the ruling mafias and a mindset that is becoming increasingly despotic and ruinous.
Pakistan stands at the crossroads. On the one hand, the rulers have actually created a haven for themselves and are standing guard threateningly to further enhance their illicit gains secured through a criminal manipulation of the system and its institutions. On the other hand, people are crumbling under the increasing weight of their meagre existence. This is made worse by the multi-faceted humiliation they have to endure at the hands of the ruling mafias and a mindset that is becoming increasingly despotic and ruinous
We have a breed of people sitting in the assemblies that represents the traditional and brazen usurpation that they have so indolently practised and perfected. This approach does not provision even the slightest disagreement and promotes only what has to be practised irrespective of whether it lives up to the barest of benchmarks of equality and equity. The sinister motive remains to enrich a miniscule minority by depriving the vast majority of their inalienable rights guaranteed in the constitution, a book that they have virtually consigned to the dustbin. This has, over time, and because of multiplication of existential problems, led to the formation of a self-destructive mindset afflicting the underprivileged which remains resigned to their individual and collective plight and which believes in continued subservience before the ruling mafias in a depleting bid for survival.
So, the challenge is two-fold. One, to make people aware and conscious of their ignoble plight as also of their right to fight it and, two, to get them ready for a battle to secure what is rightfully theirs. Both are equally challenging tasks. Having suffered an uninterrupted economic, even physical incarceration at the cruel hands of a mafia-made system and their own deprivations in terms of an inability of putting together the wherewithal to launch any meaningful struggle, they have, over time, lost the will to resist. It is like plunging into a deep slumber and refusing to look beyond their plightful immediacy.
Amidst all this is another massive challenge which many are not even willing to acknowledge, much less discuss. It is the moral collapse that the society has suffered overwhelmingly from over time, reducing it to becoming a soul-less entity that is up for sale for measly morsels to ensure existence for a while longer. There is no substance left. There are only these ever-increasing skeletons roaming the streets in a direction-less pursuit of meaningless bits and pieces. Living for a cause, for a reason has been reduced to becoming an alien concept and any such venture into the forbidden alley can only be at the risk of your continued survival.
So, the challenge is two-fold. One, to make people aware and conscious of their ignoble plight as also of their right to fight it and, two, to get them ready for a battle to secure what is rightfully theirs. Both are equally challenging tasks. Having suffered an uninterrupted economic, even physical incarceration at the cruel hands of a mafia-made system and their own deprivations in terms of an inability of putting together the wherewithal to launch any meaningful struggle, they have, over time, lost the will to resist. It is like plunging into a deep slumber and refusing to look beyond their plightful immediacy
The jokers in the parliament threaten, for public consumption, to take their political adversaries to the ‘cleaners’, but are united as one in safeguarding what they have accumulated over decades in the context of power and allied gains. Under no circumstances would they agree to yield even the slightest chunk of that illicit empire. On the contrary, there is no likelihood of slackening of the effort to further sharpen the tentacles of usurpation and strangulate the emaciated millions to virtual extinction. These are the broad contours of the social contract that has emerged over a period of time superseding the one contained in the book of law. The constitutional one is only for display and the one developed collectively by the bands of thugs and marauders that have ruled the country sequentially is the one for practising. The existing gulf between the rulers and the ruled is increasing at an alarming pace to the disadvantage of those who are already reeling under the draconian precepts of a grossly inequitable dispensation.
This moral collapse is principally owed to the lot of the leadership that we have in the country. There is not a soul that can escape the clutches of justice. There are reams of evidence against each one of them. The Sharifs have been accused of money-laundering, bank default to the tune of billions, evasion of taxes and ownership of property within and outside the country which is disproportionate with their stated earnings. The Zardaris have been involved in criminal assaults, receiving kick-backs and accumulating wealth in safer places while the one who heads a fascist and criminal concoction from London is also accused of money-laundering and innumerable murders. The Chaudhrys have been guilty of corruption and providing a ready-made platform to all hues of dictators who came charging. The religious parties have reduced religion to becoming their handmaiden to power. Maulana Fazalur Rehman’s feats are indescribably demeaning to say the least and the JUI (S) and Jamaat-e-Islami not far behind in manipulating religion for their petty and sectarian motives. The break-away factions and smaller parties are always on the lookout for buyers to sell their souls to for a price which has continued to increase with the passage of time. Imran has inexplicably gathered a lot around him whose hands are tarnished and who are guilty of having been part of corrupt and despotic dispensations. He says he has cleansed them of their past, but does he really know whether that would be the case once they are put to the test?
Amidst all this is another massive challenge which many are not even willing to acknowledge, much less discuss. It is the moral collapse that the society has suffered overwhelmingly from over time, reducing it to becoming a soul-less entity that is up for sale for measly morsels to ensure existence for a while longer. There is no substance left. There are only these ever-increasing skeletons roaming the streets in a direction-less pursuit of meaningless bits and pieces. Living for a cause, for a reason has been reduced to becoming an alien concept and any such venture into the forbidden alley can only be at the risk of your continued survival
There is not an exception. There is not a speck of hope to go by. The leaders are all part of a pack of hounds who are out to kill and annihilate. They have been used to the taste of blood for long and they would not settle for anything short of that. Man’s inhumanity to man is beyond words. I am reminded of Gloucester speaking the inimitable lines:
I’ th’ last night’s storm I such a fellow saw,
Which made me think a man a worm. My son
Came then into my mind, and yet my mind
Was then scarce friends with him. I have heard more since.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.
They kill us for their sport.
-William Shakespeare, King Lear
Read ‘arrogant and blood-thirsty leaders’ for ‘gods’ and one may have a small measure of what we are afflicted with!
That’s not all. The effects of the rampant corruption the leaders have gruesomely indulged in have trickled down to the ordinary folks as well who now indulge in it for pleasure and survival both. In fact, the country has been reduced to small fiefdoms where criminal gangs operate who conceive ever new and cruel means and methods of depriving the others of their rightful holdings and would not even shy of killing for ransom. Nothing, absolutely nothing is safe. Not a day passes without some tragedy or the other turning the television screens red. Not a day passes without agony billowing forth from innumerable homes across the country. Rape, arson, terror, torture, fear of being held for blasphemy or wedded to the Qu’ran, there is a spate of reasons to expect the worst in the day-to-day living. No crime would be punished. Even the judiciary lives in fear of reprisals – either from the criminal rulers, or from the manipulators of religion!
Then there are needless provisions in the constitution which are impracticable, yet these cannot be touched for fear of a backlash. No logical argument would justify their inclusion in the first place, or their retention in the book of law, yet no one from among the legislators has the courage to speak up. The best occasion was when the parliament was debating the 18th amendment to the constitution. These provisions could also have either been deleted altogether, or appropriately amended, but this was not done. Understandably, the leaders wanted these for continued manipulation to serve their petty and vested interests.
It is no longer a society in decline. It has virtually collapsed and only a miracle can resurrect it to any level of survival. But, miracles don’t just happen. The pit of regression and degeneration has been reached many times over, but our charlatans are always able to fathom deeper and yet more degenerate recesses to fall to. The incumbent gangs with their perpetuating mechanisms and the new ones with their promise of change, a resurrection appears to be beyond them all. Their message, besides creating a false hope for better times, is not studded with any concrete indicators of what and how they want to achieve the desired goals. Staying strictly within the domain of constitutionalism, one can only see more frustration piling up which, at some point soon, is likely to become an unbearable burden of pain and grief. The rest will be history
The entire spectrum is rotten. There has been a systematic criminalisation of politics and the laws have been rendered inequitable. The rich committing a crime go unpunished while the poor are interned even for crimes which they did not commit. There is no genuine recourse to justice. Lower courts remain smitten with blatant corruption while the superior courts are mostly engaged with the inane. People have to travel hundreds of miles to appear before a judge only to be told that their case has been deferred to another date. The police and the Patwari, individually and jointly, control the lives of every living creature within their domain who mostly survive in fear of being accused of the worst of crimes just to satiate someone’s cruel instinct.
It is no longer a society in decline. It has virtually collapsed and only a miracle can resurrect it to any level of survival. But, miracles don’t just happen. The pit of regression and degeneration has been reached many times over, but our charlatans are always able to fathom deeper and yet more degenerate recesses to fall to.
The incumbent gangs with their perpetuating mechanisms and the new ones with their promise of change, a resurrection appears to be beyond them all. Their message, besides creating a false hope for better times, is not studded with any concrete indicators of what and how they want to achieve the desired goals. Staying strictly within the domain of constitutionalism, one can only see more frustration piling up which, at some point soon, is likely to become an unbearable burden of pain and grief. The rest will be history.