A perfect recipe for brutality

Floods, shoe pelting, Sialkot, cricket criminality, bomb blasts – Pakistan’s crises are legion, but hardly legendary.

Floods, shoe pelting, Sialkot, cricket criminality, bomb blasts – plus all the crises with which this country is beset on a non-stop basis – concentrate the mind. But not for long as they are all soon overtaken. What happened to Musharraf? Where is the NRO? How is the presidential health, mental and physical, both of which were highly dicey a few years ago? And the Kerry-Lugar issue? Pakistan’s crises are legion — but hardly legendary.

With shoes flying around all over the place these latter-days without landing on target one wondered what had happened to good old-fashioned tomatoes and eggs which tend to be far more effective as they are tricky to stop in mid-flight and generally land where aimed. So it was gratifying to read that the Pakistani cricketers were given a good old dose of rotten tomatoes when exiting their London hotel.

What caused a mini-flurry on these pages over the past week was Mahreen Khan’s column on nation-bashing in response to articles by a couple of co-pen-pushers. I am not comfortable at being included in the ‘human cockroach’ category, that insect being highly repulsive and attracted solely by filth. However, the originator of the phrase has every right to his opinion.

Now to the other one. Converts, whether religious or nationalist, are extremists. Naturally they have to be so to prove the point to themselves and to others. Converts surely find it troublesome to be true to themselves. They must be holier than the pope, more loyal than the king. Take Yousuf Youhana in his second life, with his pious posturing on the cricket field, his magnificent chin-growth, and the frequent announcements confirming his utter adherence to his adopted faith.

When one switches nationalities, as millions of Pakistanis have done, it is normally to get out of a country that has little to offer and into another country that can provide a better life, better prospects, law and order, and a secure future — and to be rid of the green passport.

One can only scratch one’s head in wonderment at why someone would choose to move to a country such as this, in its present state. As admitted, it is a country that has “always been a society underpinned by latent brutality”, and lots of other such undesirable stuff. So what on earth would be the reason to abandon a nationality one was born with and which millions seek in vain, for a nationality that is often a pain in the posterior?

Of course, it goes without saying, we are all free to express our opinions on these pages and to amicably agree to differ. In the case of the second pen-pusher it was the overuse of the world ‘we’, the desperate need to identify, which grated.

As to the root cause of the “latent brutality”, yes the country was born in bloodshed, murder and mayhem — plus rather a lot brutal corruption in the form of left-behind-property grabbing. Then came the Objectives Resolution in 1949 which institutionalised bigotry and its related violence. Then we move on to an absence of law and order, and ethics and morality, and to the enforced religiosity of the Ziaul Haq years which grossly enhanced the culture of brutality. It has, all along the way, conveniently been forgotten by our brutally corrupt leaderships that the founder of this nation adamantly stated that the first duty of any government is to impose and maintain law and order — and, most vitally, that religion is not the business of the state.

When a self-adopted brand of faith is thrust down the national gullet by clerics (who should have no voice) and power-hungry politicos and generals who pander to them, it is a perfect recipe for brutality and slaughter — as is evidenced on an almost daily basis.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 4^th, 2010.