Stop blaming others for our problems

Imagined foreign enemies conspiring against us displaces focus from corrupt ruling groups, to external enemies.

Pakistan faces many crises — horizontally, from one area of national life to another, and vertically, from lower ranks of the society up to the top of the ruling groups. In simple terms, crisis is a ‘time of danger or great difficulty’. If you look beyond your personal comfort zones, if you have any, you cannot miss symptoms like fear, insecurity, intolerance and loss of hope. While we reflect over dangerous trends that pull us down and may keep us there — corruption, violence, mass murders on ethnic and political grounds to population explosion — one in particular needs special attention. This is the growing sense of victimhood at a popular level that external forces have turned against Muslims.

The reasons for terming this mindset a sign of social crisis are twofold. First, it diverts our attention from our internal weaknesses. Unless we recognise what is wrong within us, we in Pakistan and Muslims in other societies will not be able to achieve progress or enlightenment at the pace that other countries around the world have. Second, the imagined foreign enemies doing nothing but conspiring against us displaces our focus from corrupt ruling groups that continue to rob and exploit us. It helps when as we look out for enemies beyond our borders.

Social and political narratives informed both by religious ethos and radical ideologies have drawn a clear line of demarcation among nations. For instance, anti-colonial ideas and independence movements rightly divided the world between the colonised and the coloniser, the western world. In most Muslim countries, remarkably in Pakistan, anti-westernism is coloured by religious and civilisational differences. The West is falsely portrayed as a singular power structure in pyramidal fashion, above which sits the US, running the world power show. Religious groups and their demagogues with effective use of modern media have cultivated this narrative for a very long time — here and elsewhere. This benefits and supports a particular politics of identity, power and confrontation with the traditional ruling classes at home, as they are portrayed not as autonomous actors acting in self-interest but subordinate ruling class subservient to ‘imperial’ interests.

This is a well-calculated political strategy to achieve two major objectives. First, it is meant to further delegitimise the power of the ruling groups that have already lost considerable popular support. Second, it promotes radical solutions to national crises in arguing that the existing representative system cannot deliver, that democracy is alien and that the prevailing political norms and institutions bear a foreign imprint.

Externalising frustration and disappointment by a failing society and state like Pakistan can only rob itself of the opportunity of integrating itself with the modern world. If we can learn something from fast-growing Muslim societies like Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, it is the importance of having dense interaction with the western world.

While we can dream and even rightfully struggle for a just world and just world order, we may not find the world perfect, as it has never been and will never be. The lesson from human progress is that people with resolution, foresight, direction and focused struggle can change their destiny. If others can, so can we in Pakistan. The first step is to stop blaming others for our woes and get serious about what is wrong with us. Only through a rational self-analysis of social and political conditions can we chart our course for some positive change.

My reading of the world community is very different from the victimhood narrative; it wants Pakistan to succeed.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th,  2011.