Waiting for change

I guess this was an election event to be remembered. It was also the first time I had ever voted. I queued up with hundreds who were also voting for the first time. The ambience was festive and for that brief moment in time, I think everybody in that line thought they were instrumental in bringing some change. I mused Pakistan was lucky that it was not shackled by a two-party system. We have choices, I thought, and more so for a makeover this time around. I feel a little naive now. I feel led on by the incessant barrage of convincing rhetoric blaring on television, flashing on social media and reflected off all the eager faces I met leading up to this election.



I have been indifferent most of my adult life to political change. But here I was, in line, voting. The politicians tugged at my heartstrings and compelled me to question my long-standing apathy. And then, Imran Khan toppling over was the clincher. I was hooked to the unfolding soap opera that started with a cloaked cleric from Canada marching his way to the capital and ended with a teary Nawaz Sharif appearing to fight the campaign of his life. So, I stood in that unending queue, feeling proud and patriotic, magnanimously directing fellow voters in the right direction so they queued appropriately. Not once in that sweltering heat and the unusual delay in the voting process did I question the system. I let myself believe that since the country is held together by a healthy democracy, voting in a leader is only the natural result I am a part of.

And now, after the tinsel dust has settled and the clouds of euphoria have blown south to free my impaired reality, I feel much better. I am my old apathetic self again. Now and then I reprimand myself: what was I thinking? Did Imran Khan and all those politicians really convince me that one morning, we will wake up and a new Pakistan will just spring up in this age-old Indus Valley? We in Pakistan, who cannot give up even the most mundane of cultural rituals, thought that we were reborn.

It takes time to accept reality. For some, it is taking even longer. I watch the sit-ins and sadly read the various invitations on social media for these protests and feel a distant sympathy for those who are having trouble simply seeing the light. I want to tell them that they are living in make-believe. We live in Pakistan and not a socially and politically correct state. Most people do not vote based on democratic ideology. We are a poor country and most of the heartland is used to looking to their local bigwig for their freedom and their next meal. Yes, voters live in cities, too, but most of us who can read this article do not belong to neighbourhoods where mobs rule and local and religious ties are stronger than any notions of rebuilding a distant dream of a democratic and socially fair country.

The sweeping change was supposed to be the PTI, at least, in the minds of the so-called idealists. Sadly, for the idealists, voting habits are hard to change in this vast diaspora of far-flung polling stations and a deeply polarised people. Imran Khan has only emerged as the drone buster, a dream he has sold to those war weary people of Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan and they voted for him and made it the region for him to make a difference in. There is nothing unconvincing about his dream for a better future. Two weeks ago, I believed it too. I forgot though that we live in Pakistan and ideals and idealists make good fiction. The process of life in Pakistan is slow to turn and no cataclysmic tsunami can wash away its daily grind and the slow-turning cogs of its political structure.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 27^th, 2013.