Politics and conflict

Bad politics in the name of common man in every part and province has created disorder and conflict in society

Just a reminder: politics is not about grabbing and retaining power by every fair and foul mean, or using power for personal ends. Another reminder: since politics is essentially about power and power relations, it is a universal practice, and happens everywhere, whether you have a state or stateless tribal society, and whether you are a strong or a weak state. Also, there is good politics and bad politics. I am using the idea of good or bad in politics from a citizen’s perspective. From this end of the power spectrum, good politics is about ensuring wellbeing, security, stability, happiness, freedom and generally the progress of society, where an individual citizen finds opportunity to pursue the ideals of his life.

The bad politics is quite the opposite of it; it diminishes the individual, shortens life, and what happens around the individual becomes nasty and brutish — to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), one of the great English thinkers of all time. Nothing of the sort of politics practised today in Pakistan has anything common with that period of British history, political controversies and clash of ideas that were prevalent in Hobbes’s time. However, the one thing that makes Hobbes relevant to present-day Pakistan and many other societies is his enduring idea of anarchy, disorder and conflict in society, and how these take the civility, civilisation and even hope of life out of citizens. Actually, it is his explanation of what makes the difference between social order or peace, and disorder or conflict. Politics is the exercise of power to protect, first and foremost, life and property. Everything good follows from these two protections. These are indeed the primary functional responsibilities of the state, any state, today.

What about liberty? Hobbes relegated it to secondary position or even no position at all in the conflict of power and ideas in his times. He defended monarchy and autocracy because he feared anarchy, disorder and conflict in society. Like many thinkers of the preceding Greek classical age, he had no faith in the wisdom and intelligence of our celebrated common man. Many elite theorists and autocracies around the world, like our military regimes and the defenders of military-controlled political order, have premised their vision and ideas on that part of human history and knowledge of societies that draw a very pessimistic view of man and his power to shape the political world.

However, the idea of liberty, associated with John Locke (1632-1704) and the deeper passion and meanings of his works, have influenced the course of history and development of modern ideas from the time of the Enlightenment thinkers to modern-day democrats. The American revolutionaries were so much influenced by his thoughts that they liberally borrowed his words in writing the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, happiness being more comprehensive than Locke’s formulation of “life, liberty and property”.

Pakistan has lived through and continues to balance itself between the pulls of order, meaning security and liberty, which are at the foundation of our constitutional order. There is considerable disillusionment with the bad politics of pseudo-democrats in the country. Frankly speaking, their bad politics in the name of the common man in every part and province of the country has created disorder and conflict in society — greed, corruption and misuse of power. When this happens, the common citizen loses his power to elect the right civil government, as well as the ability to hold it accountable for its misdeeds.

This may push society to the basic instinct of looking for security — and the end of ‘democracy’. Never must we allow pseudo-democrats to push the country in that direction.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 29^th,  2015.

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