“Even if they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left I will not give up my mission”
“I read your last article, Humayun,” said Maverick impishly. “Brimming with idealism, what? At least you have nice dreams, not nightmares. You made only passing reference to President Xi Jinping wearing a Mao suit but didn’t explain its significance.”
“The significance is obvious, Maverick. It means that Deng Xiao Ping’s new grafted ideology that I call ‘Communist-Capitalism’ has got corrupted and veered more towards free-for-all market capitalism in place of strictly and properly regulated capitalism that enables business and entrepreneurship and disables loot, plunder and suffering. Regulation is just that: keeping whatever is to be regulated within sensible rules. It should not disable business or allow it to go on a rampage, as it has done in the West. This corruption is causing free-for-all market capitalism to displace political and administrative communism and the Chinese Communist Party and State Council are in danger of becoming corrupt bureaucracies themselves, just as Soviet communism did and became State capitalism in the name of communism. Xi is already leading a major war against corruption. Wearing the Mao suit signals that he is going to win back the space that political communism has lost to unregulated capitalism: properly reclaiming regulated capitalism by removing the ‘free-for-all’ market element. The Chinese say it in signals.
“As to idealism, Maverick, it is the best – perhaps only – agent of change. Without idealism the world would remain static and there would be no progress. But then change is a constant in the cosmos; it was also the basis of Hegel’s metaphysical dialectic and the effect in Marx’s dialectical materialism based on conflict. All the great religions and scriptures of the world came for change. You cannot hang by the arms of a clock like a moron hoping to stop time. Better, then, to make your way to the ‘event horizon’ of a black hole where physical and linear time stops.”
It means that Deng Xiao Ping’s new grafted ideology that I call ‘Communist-Capitalism’ has got corrupted and veered more towards free-for-all market capitalism in place of strictly and properly regulated capitalism that enables business and entrepreneurship and disables loot, plunder and suffering
Maverick looked worried: “What the hell are you going on about, Humayun? I thought gibberish was our preserve. Are you slightly touched?”
“Look Maverick,” I replied patiently. “Idealists are always touched – they have to be to be idealists. It is in the nature of humans, even slaves, to stick to the world they know, which is the status quo, for it gives them a sense of familiarity and security. Change frightens them, for they fear that there may not be the same station in life for them in a new status quo or they might even be destroyed. For example, an absentee feudal lord fears change for it might partially or wholly deprive him of his lands and his serfs and slaves too who breaks their back for a pittance to give him millions without him having to lift a finger bar occasional visits to his lands to reinforce his overlordship and to make a political place for himself. So he fights change tooth and nail and invents all sorts of arguments from religious to economic to political to social to armed conflict to prevent it. Same for businessmen and industrialists or whoever: see how they go on strike the moment even a small tax is imposed on them. They find security and stability in stasis, insecurity and instability in change. They are not wrong to fear change for fear of losing something, especially ill gotten, is in their nature. But then if society remains static there will be no progress for which change is an imperative and for change idealism is an imperative. The best is to remove the unfair influence, wealth and power of a few people without destroying them and try and make all the deprived people influential and well off with at least their fundamental human rights met by the State in an egalitarian society. That cannot be done without change and change cannot take place without idealism.
“Maverick, when I said last week ‘from idea, to ideal, to ideology’, I should have added ‘idealism’ and ‘idealistic’ – a person who is an ‘idealist’. Idealism comes from genuine belief with understanding that regularly peels back layers for even deeper understanding in a Faith or ideology. It is an unending quest that leads to ‘idealism’ that you mock so, while unquestioned blind belief without understanding gradually adulterates the belief itself and pollutes the mind and leads to extremism.
“I am proud to be called an idealist. I would like my country to be the ‘Revolutionary People’s Islamic Welfare State of Pakistan’ whose prime justification and purpose for existence is the implementation of Haqooq ul Ibad or the Creator’s Charter of the Rights of His Creations. That is exactly what Mr Jinnah wanted. This idealism is my abiding joy; that I am not a good idealist is my abiding regret. Pragmatism, that you so pride yourself on, means compromising with the Devil. It doesn’t fly with me. Pragmatism is not realism. What flies with me is idealistic realism, which means idealism embedded in reality. Just look at what idealists have achieved, then look at the mess pragmatists have left behind.
“Look, our Prophet (pbuh) was an idealist and realist at the same time: he shunned wealth and power offered by the unbelievers – “even if they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left I will not give up my mission” – but he also signed the Treaty of Hudaibiya because the enemy heavily outnumbered him and he wanted time to build his forces. We are enjoined to emulate him, not consign him to false ‘history’ books written by charlatan ‘historians’.
“If Mr Jinnah had not been an idealist there would have been no Pakistan. If those who followed had not been pragmatists the mess we are in wouldn’t have been created. So please don’t confuse pragmatism with realism: all great idealists are ruthless realists at the same time. As I said, our own Prophet (pbuh) was simultaneously an idealist and a realist: an idealist who could topple a pagan faith of idol worship and replace it with a new Faith in which God could not be seen, heard, felt or smelled. However, if you have a working inner eye you can see God everywhere in nature, even in your little finger when it moves or a nail when it grows. If you cannot see Him even then, then surely you will know Him when your soul is pulled out of your throat and you go to the next dimension. Then you cannot avoid seeing God. Then you will know.
“All great spiritual and secular statesmen change the world. But when they start out they are mocked – sorcerers, magicians, madmen, poets, actors, charlatans, dreamers, Kafir-e-Azam, half naked fakir, terrorist and what have you. You are welcome to your pragmatism Maverick, but remember it is another word for compromise full of bombast and bluster born of a lack of spine and conscience.”
“Well, my dear Sir,” said Maverick, irritated, “Pakistan is not a functioning state because it doesn’t have a functioning judiciary, only a pantomime of it, so it has been reduced of a pantomime of a Stare in which overgrown juveniles play ‘government-government’. Thus too it doesn’t have a functioning democracy that delivers to the people and helps create institutions. Those wreckages that you see on Constitution Avenue are the judiciary, parliament, civil secretariat, presidency and the prime minister’s office. They are the wrecks of our hearts. The only thing that is functioning is the military, which is why the people are looking to it for rescue and deliverance. But it is working for military purposes only for which they are meant, not politics. Sadly, yet another political failure is sucking the army into the political realm. That, as I’ve always said, is also part of the political and societal evolutionary process in which states themselves are not static either – just a State that reflects the state of society at a particular point in evolution. Perhaps the word ‘State’ comes from your ‘state’ at that time, society’s ‘status’ at that point in time as it were that is your ‘state’ sometimes formed as a ‘State’. I don’t know.”
“This violent change has happened before, born of desperation – sometime revolution, sometime military coup. But two military and two army governments have shown that they don’t have the answers either. Soon the people get fed up with generals too and send them away in ignominy – not totally undeservedly. Would you rather risk a fifth one in the unlikely hope that it may have the answers? We have all learned lessons and moved on mentally and emotionally. More likely, it could become yet another period of bedecked generals puffed up with false self-importance ruling the roost for a while till they self-destruct and we are back to politics of the rapacious kind, politicians created in the army’s nursery not far from its dairy farm, where they have sperm banks and cloning facilities too. Yet another political failure by the army would take us back behind starting point again. Or would you rather the political evolutionary process under this system continues and finds it own natural destruction and then a better equilibrium? Sure it will be very painful, but an army government would be painful too at least for some people, those who have been corrupt and misgoverned badly and unlawfully and lived off the fat of the land. And there is no gainsaying that some army personnel might not get corrupted too with untrammelled power as some always do. It’s a very difficult one.”
Say what you may with Asif Zardari, Senate chairman Raza Rabbani and the prime minister basically admitting last week that the army and civilian government are not on the same page, the end could be nigh
“You said that we have moved on”, asked Maverick. “How? Where?”
“Maverick, an increasing number of people are realising that the British parliamentary system doesn’t work and a presidential system would be better with a two-candidate contest in a second ballot at every level of government, provided no one has won an outright majority in the first. People are talking of new provinces to make them manageable. Right now our provinces are bigger than most countries both population and area wise. They are talking about a new electoral system. Most important of all, people realise that there need to be drastic changes to the Constitution: 21 amendments have made it a self-contradictory, self-defeating mish-mash. I will tell you about the system that might – repeat might – work for Pakistan. But it’s not important what I think but what the army thinks. What plan, if any, does it have to save Pakistan and try systems that might work?”
“You forgot the Supreme Court,” said Maverick. “It has become a comedy show. The prime minister attends the swearing-in of two chief justices in short order, the second a 23-day wonder, and then runs away because at the tea that follows the army chief attracts more attention. Why, at the first one the guests raised slogans in favour of the general, embarrassing the PM no end. The second time they invited very few people – stooges really – but the PM left before tea again.”
“He probably doesn’t like the tea served at the presidency, Maverick, especially if it doesn’t come with ‘gol gappas’, the president’s specialty that made him president.”
“You can’t desist from your wisecracks, Humayun,” said Maverick. “It will get you in trouble one day my boy and you may be banned from ever eating gol gappas again. So watch it.”
“I don’t like gol gappas anyway,” I said. “I only heard of them when I got married to a Karachi girl who ate gol gappas like they are going out of fashion. She even drank the leftover lethal brew like an elixir. Yuk.”
“Anyway,” said Maverick, “say what you may with Asif Zardari, Senate chairman Raza Rabbani and the prime minister basically admitting last week that the army and civilian government are not on the same page, the end could be nigh.”
“Not good, not if the army doesn’t know as usual what it’s doing,” I said. “Whether it has any plan I don’t know and I don’t want to know. But I have a plan that I can and will tell.”
“I don’t want to know either,” said Maverick and scurried off to protect his tribe.
