The curse of ‘saving Pakistan’
In 2015, there were more mass shootings in the United States than there are days in a year. A grand protest erupted in Baltimore over relentless brutality of the police while Detroit crawls onward after having declared bankruptcy in 2013. At no point was there a public discussion to strip the inept American politician of his powers, and consider an alternative to constitutional civilian governance.
Politicians are a universally hated human sub-species. Honesty is never expected of them. They were being derided as ‘psychopaths’ long before prominent psychologists added scientific weight to the widespread notion. Jon Ronson – the author of ‘The Psychopath Test’ – points out that politics is a field that benefits from the traits that define psychopath. These traits include charm, intelligence, and the ability to emotionally distance oneself from the consequences of one’s hard decisions. The very mention of the word ‘politician’ invokes an image of moral depravity. In the popular American TV series ‘True Blood’, Eric Northman attempts to make a witty case for himself and the public acceptance of his blood-sucking kin by slyly asking, “Who would you rather trust? A vampire, or a politician?”
There is virtually no democratic nation on earth whose denizens cannot list 99 problems, off the top of their heads, with their government and its officials. A democracy, being the government of the people, is as flawed as the people. The human race continues to disappoint us with its tradition of error upon error, but unless the responsibility can be delegated to a superior non-human species, this is a problem we have to collectively work with.
In Pakistan, strangely, it is commonplace for people to question their own rights and freedoms in rigorous search for alternatives to democracy. Voting rights? Elected representatives? A say in how you get to be ruled, and by whom? That thing millions across the world have fought and died for? No, thank you.
Amidst roaring applause, Imran Khan declared that a certain dictatorship was better than the current ruling party’s democracy. Conventional wisdom here suggests that a good dictatorship trumps a bad democracy in its value to the progress of this nation. And should a democratic regime prove unsatisfactory, the answer is not necessarily to vote it out of office but to reconsider the merit of meritocratic democracy itself.
Often, the word “democracy” comes with its own natural sarcastic quotation marks. The People’s Party has attempted to re-popularise the government of the people (get it?) by raising frequent slogans of “saving democracy”. Other political parties have often chimed in on the sentiment. Among the general public, the notion of ‘saving democracy’ is often regarded as being at odds with the objective of ‘saving Pakistan’, and has been thoroughly mocked in drawing rooms, media channels, and on Facebook pages.
This is awkward because the right to mock ‘democracy’ is a democratic right in itself.
A few years ago, Al-Jazeera reported a South Asian survey indicating that a staggering 49 percent of Pakistanis believed that it did not matter whether the country was ruled by a dictator or a democratically elected politician, as opposed to 21 percent of Indians who held the same view. This is an interesting comparison because it’s long been believed that Pakistan and India share many of the same problems, particularly corruption and VIP culture; both of which are problems that have become the defining traits of civilian governance, as far as the skeptics are concerned.
Egypt, amidst great fanfare, attained its democratic rights in 2011, only to take a rapid U-turn into the arms of another dictator. Repulsively, even many of the democracy-starved liberals of Pakistan celebrated the unconstitutional ousting of the elected Egyptian President, Mohammad Morsi, on social media. This is because Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a right-wing ruler who had implemented a series of Islamist policies that had irked progressives everywhere, albeit for good reasons. So much so that even the United States – hailed as democracy’s finest cheerleader – felt the need to distance itself from the fireworks at Tahrir Square, and refused to call el-Sisi’s takeover a ‘coup’.
This exemplifies a legitimate problem. Democracy is the government of the people, but what if the people don’t want the crown? If a clear majority of a nation votes against its own voting rights, wouldn’t the implementation of dictatorship itself be a democratic decision?
No. Egypt is a nation that has spent most of its existence under either monarchy or dictatorship. Nations that have had insufficient or fragmented exposure to democracy are usually less appreciative of its enormous potential. Egyptians have lived far too long under authoritarian regimes using media to impress upon them the insignificance of their voting rights, and teaching them that democracy is irrelevant as long as the unelected ruler is benevolent, and good for the economy. The longer a nation has been indoctrinated to think of its desire to exert some influence over its own government as a selfish whim that contradicts the welfare of the state, the more that nation is likely to reject democracy.
A democratic politician is a hired chauffer who may not be perfect or even satisfactory at his job, but someone who is subject to your approval to drive as you sit vigilantly in the backseat. Anything else would be the equivalent of a passenger locked in the trunk of a Honda, praying in the dark that the driver knows what he’s doing.
Democracy takes time because it is a kind of government anchored to the ground by the will of its own people. It therefore follows the principle that either we all move forward or none of us do. It takes time for people to get used to their own powers and harness them in responsible ways. Any attempt at undermining the forces of democracy and stripping its agents of their constitutional powers, is an attempt to disarm ourselves.
