How has Pakistan’s civil democracy helped the country?
In 2012, a beast emerged from the agitated waters of the mighty Atlantic and went straight for America. Belied by its granny-ish name – “Sandy” – this giant maelstrom of raging and swirling winds struck the American shores like a battering ram. It brought with it heavy snow, hail, and vast quantities of water. Within hours of its descent, New York was flooding, cell phone carriers were down, and there were unprecedented power outages. Time Square, that unsleeping pageant of flash and colour, went completely dark and empty. Manhattan suddenly resembled a ghost town.
But that was not to be the case for too long. Even though the beast pounded its fists over the coast line, sweeping and ravaging its way across the mainland with mad gusty 90 mph winds, Bloomberg’s disaster recovery teams were equal to the task. Within a few days, in spite of heavy infrastructural damages, blocked routes and deep flooding, most of the basic necessities of life – roads, electricity, and communication links — were repaired and salvaged. There was the regrettable loss of life, but it could have been far worse had the rescue teams not done their due diligence. Following the incident, there was talk of lessons learned and holding accountable those who could have done a better job.
This is what makes nations great, that when calamity strikes, they strip all denominational tags and stripes and get to work. Rising above the personal for the collective becomes their moral and national imperative. And those in authority and positions of power lead the way. Because they understand that power without due responsibility is like a crown without a king – unworthy and useless.
The point is that how come, in this day and age, such self- generated catastrophes can transpire with such morbid regularity in our beloved crisis-hugging country?
The people of New York who rescued their cities from Sandy”s death-grip were not Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers, busily unpacking Kant and Voltaire. They were firemen, policemen, repairmen, technicians, etc, — regular people. They combined fierce diligence and effective planning to enable a return to the default – steady and calm – state of affairs.
The point is this: To be a successful nation does not require the hashing of complex political theories and untangling of the great conundrums of the human condition. That is doubtless important, but running the affairs of a country is more a matter of common sense, integrity and accountability than anything else; all three of which are endangered species at home in Pakistan.
While the world talks of teleportation and future Mars trips, Pakistan almost defiantly manages to backslide into human pre-history with its light-less cities, gas-less kitchens and now its fuel deprived pumps.
The current petrol crisis is just another symptom of a diseased whole. Yes we can blame the distributers for keeping the oil stocks low due to the falling petrol prices, just like we can blame Ogra for poor regulation, PSO for mismanagement, ministry of petroleum for incompetent supply chain handling, ministry of finance for stopping PSO from importing more oil last year, and the government for, well, just about everything, but the point is that how come, in this day and age, such self- generated catastrophes can transpire with such morbid regularity in our beloved crisis-hugging country?
This calls for a serious appraisal of the whole notion of civil governance in Pakistan. Yes we all support democracy while equally condemning martial rule – a sinister legacy of the Colonial Raj – because in theory that is the right thing to do. But what about in practice? How has Pakistan’s civil democracy helped the country? Has it introduced new players to the game? Any fresh faces and brilliant minds? New strategies and novel practices?
If foreign policy, national security, crisis and control management, among other areas of civil governance, all fall under the military’s purview, then why at all stick to the pretense of a civil democracy?
The fact, depressingly manifest all over TV and newsprint, is that nothing much has changed. The idea that democracy necessitates change may have found online casino a stubborn and melancholy exception in Pakistan. What change, one might ask, is there when the man elected to the highest seat of power has previously occupied the same seat, twice, and that too a long time ago? And just as the faces have remained the same, so have the policies. Today we see a similar “Lego” obsession with metro buses that one observed with the yellow cabs in the previous millennium. The foreign and domestic policy, governance strategy and national vision haven’t budged much either. It all seems eerily recursive — these haunting reruns of a forgettable past; an interminable fever dream that the entire country is seeing as one terrified whole.
So, yes, while many Pakistanis justifiably rant and rage over previous martial regimes, there is something to be said about the alternative on offer – civil democracy – that has for most of its history been much like a crippled man on crutches who can barely take a few steps forward without pleading for help from those very quarters that he rests all his woes on – the army. Every time there is a major calamity in the country, like the Earthquake that shook the Margallas in 2005 or the recent floods in 2010, the army is called in for help. Even the dispensation of swift justice is often outsourced to the army, as we see with the whole setting up of military courts in the aftermath of 12/16. If foreign policy, national security, crisis and control management, among other areas of civil governance, all fall under the military’s purview, then why at all stick to the pretense of a civil democracy? If the true spirit of democracy — reform and change — is woefully absent from the whole equation, and there is a real possibility that the same faces will hound and haunt us till the end of our days, then why was Musharraf’s regime so unacceptable? Why we did we take to the streets chanting “Go-Musharraf-Go” slogans only to repeat the same for Zardari and Sharif; the former a chairperson of the party “we” voted into power and the latter a man re-elected by “us” for the third time over two decades.
More than petrol, we should be concerned about our mental health as a nation. And let’s not forget, dictatorship has many faces and it doesn”t always come wearing a military uniform.