Bankruptcy of the moral kind

Mad mullah leader Hafiz Saeed called for a nuclear jihad against India. He can get away with it; no one can stop him.

All things will pass — that is one certainty in life. Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart have just found out how true it is. For those agitating here in the homeland, they should rest assured that this present dispensation, too, will pass (and it is high time the dispensation realised it too) but they need to be fearful of what may come.

We must also be fearful for a nation when its citizens openly and viciously exhibit their contempt for their country by word and by deed — politicos do it the whole time, but does the citizenry have to follow? Examples are myriad, daily occurrences, from the dangerous to the harmless, but all in flagrant contempt for the law or for what is accepted as civilised behaviour.

The governor of a province is gunned down by a member of the law enforcement agencies — the reasons are irrelevant but the national mindset is not. The man is hailed as a hero. A foreigner guns down two citizens of Pakistan — for whatever reason — and the people call for his public hanging. Men are gunned down with regularity in what is known as ‘target killing’ in Karachi. No one objects — civil society is silent. Over 30 young men in an army college are blown up and killed in Mardan by a brainwashed youth, trained in a different sort of place of learning. It is a news item — there are no public protests. As there are not when, on a daily basis, citizens of Pakistan are shot dead, schools are bombed, women are murdered in the name of honour and citizens are murdered whilst in their places of worship.

This last word is the most misused by this nation in which honour died whilst it was born in carnage. Our ‘honour’, rooted in dishonour, stands (as it did for Lancelot, the shining knight) and it seems is fated to so stand for considerable time to come. The ghairat-wallahs, with whom our media is infested, have much for which to answer.

The government is helpless. It can control nothing. It can keep nothing within the bounds of lawfulness or of decency. Its appeasement policies have spread poison. The mullahs of the mosques, mostly government servants, openly call for hatred, intolerance and violence and in a disgraceful incident earlier this month in Lahore the mad mullah leader of the banned Jamaatud Dawa, Hafiz Saeed, a wanted man, addressing a rally, called for a nuclear jihad against India. He can get away with it; no one can stop him.

Why this open contempt for one’s country? OK, let’s move over to the harmless, but highly irritating. For instance, Pakistanis at Heathrow will queue in orderly fashion while checking in and proceed in orderly fashion to a PIA flight. Once boarded, the pride of Pakistan, its national airline (used as a governmental dumping ground for the otherwise unemployable), becomes a mini-Pakistan, order left behind, abandoned. On arrival in the homeland, the citizens charge and barge the immigration counter and, if asked why they cannot behave as in London, shoot back the scornful response, ‘but this is Pakistan!’

The same goes for locals and the traffic rules which they observe with absolute diligence when behind the wheel in foreign lands — but here, no way, because ‘this is Pakistan!’

Yes, this is Pakistan and we and the world know it — and the world is unhappy. There is something radically wrong when literally ‘anything goes,’ when we cease to be jolted by happenings, when we watch silently the deterioration in the leaderships that come to us via the ballot box, or other means — the slow steady drip-drip of morality down the national drain.

The pillars of state are wonky and wobbly. We look on, and condone corruption and definable immorality. And all in the name of democracy.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 19^th, 2011.