Belated anguish

The ghairat lot, those that talk endlessly about non-existent things like sovereignty, integrity, have forgotten much.

Anguished voices are at work in the press — the electronic media being far less anguished than belligerent, intent upon imposing their warped version of religion and of xenophobia. The anguish, which should have been around for a long time as the older generations silently watched the national mindset slide (purposefully or otherwise) steadily downwards, with the younger generations exposed to an environment of hatred, has come after the horses have bolted from their stables.

To figure out the Pakistani psyche takes some doing. The ghairat lot, those that talk endlessly about non-existent things like sovereignty and integrity, have forgotten much. The governments of Pakistan, supported by our expert commentators, since the end of the 1980s have muttered and mumbled, ranted and raved, about how the US, Pakistan’s major mentor and fund provider from its very birth, abandoned it in its hour of need after the Russian retreat from Afghanistan.

Fear and anguish is now being expressed that if and when the US pulls out of Afghanistan, Pakistan will, once again, find itself in lonesome mode. That is one side of the matter. On the other, anger and ire are in the forefront of declarations that the US must get out of Afghanistan, leave it to the Taliban, or whoever, so that Pakistan ceases to be a pawn in the game, or a lynchpin in the American war against the forces of darkness.

Well we can’t have it both ways. What does the nation want? To be kept still standing, albeit barely, by demanding that the US give more and more in cash and in kind (militarily), or, trumpeting ghairat, to tell the major donor and all the other adopted self-interested ‘friends’ to get lost, leave it alone, and let it find its own lonely way.

And what would that way be? With the country divided as it is, and many a so-called ‘liberal’ now cowed after the high-profile murder earlier this month and the response of the vociferous majority, every member of which apparently is miffed because it was not his/her finger on the trigger, the direction in which it would head is not difficult to foresee. It is not the international community which is motivating young men to strap on suicide vests and kill as many presumed innocents as they can manage. But the national sense of denial refuses to point its finger at the thousands of madrassas churning out generations of brainwashed youths.

The reality is grim: The jihadi nurseries with their hate machines working overtime are far away from any thoughts that emanate from this government and of all the governments the country has suffered since the late 1980s, none has had the guts or the brawn to take on the enemies of tolerance and bigotry. All politicians and ‘leaders’ in and out of uniform, have stuffed their pockets, flaunted their wealth and clung to power come what may, and all (with a few honourable exceptions who have paid for their stand) have dropped their pants to appease the religious right which is said to be unrepresentative, but somehow always manages to come out on top because it has behind it, using and appeasing, the might of the mighty army. The great unwashed, other than in their brains, are too meek, too imbued with ‘Allah ka marzi’, to call to account any regime for its excesses.

The major source of all woes is the non-separation between state and religion, based on the non-separation between nation and religion. Nothing but a complete separation between the two can save Pakistan from total domination by the religious mutation.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th, 2011.