The price of our ghairat

Our ghairat is far too valuable to be sacrificed for scraps of economic aid from the emperor’s table. That honour goes to nations like Iran and Venezuela that boldly defy the superpower of the day and keep the banner of their national pride flying high. There is also the example of North Korea, a country that doesn’t possess any natural bounty and yet, thumbs its nose at pretty much the entire world. Its people may be terrorised and destitute, but the sacrifice of their lives is a fair cost for qaumi ghairat. So why can’t we be the same?

The fact is that there are two models of securing national honour. One is the North Korean model, where the state takes on all and sundry regardless of its own strength vis-à-vis the one that it is being confronted. It does this by spending what little it has on building up its armed forces and by sacrificing the welfare of its people. The culmination of this model is nuclear weapons, the national equivalent of the suicide bomber’s jacket. These allow the state to say to the world, “if I go down, I’ll take you with me!” The other model is the one adopted by the countries of East Asia, where the state dedicates itself to building up its economic strength before taking on the powerful. But building strength takes time and a sustained focus. It means ensuring that the citizenry is educated and healthy, so their productivity rises and translates into greater economic output. For the ghairat brigade, this is far too long-term and dispassionate to be accepted as a solution to our crisis of national honour. So it’ll have to be the North Korean model — the same model we have followed for the last many decades. But would the outcome have been different if we had instead latched on to the ‘East Asian’ model?

Consider education. Where the state has failed, NGOs have fulfilled some of the enormous need in this sector. Presently, it would take just under 100,000 schools to educate all the children in the country up till matriculation. The cost of building all these schools is $38 billion. The annual operating cost is $3.7 billion. These are big numbers. But consider what we have sold our ghairat for in the past. The price tag is around $45 billion in aid since the Ayub era, not including the $7.5 billion currently pledged by the Kerry-Lugar Bill. This of course is the nominal amount; in today’s exchange rate, it would be many times the sum. So for a portion of what we sold our honour, we could have educated our nation. Would that hypothetically educated nation be better able to protect its honour? Maybe not. Martyrdom is the pinnacle of honour after all and when death is the greatest glory then nothing else is needed.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 24^th, 2011.