What happened to politics?

Politics in my youth was a sort of prototypical Fifty Shades of Grey — monochrome and deeply tedious, worthy but dull. It played out mostly in the newspapers — before parliament was televised — and once it was televised it became the yawn-a-thon to beat all. There was a stylised Lobster Gavotte, elections came and went, so did scandals and with the Tories it was usually sex and with Labour it was money. There were a few star turns that kept the tabloids busy and enough cranky geriatrics mumbling away on the back benches and in the Lords to feed the smouldering fires of the Fourth Estate.

And then I missed a bit. Well quite a lot actually. And the next time I looked up there was a global circus in full swing and the comfortable taupe sofa that was the politics of the past had been replaced by…err…not very much. It had all become a triumph of style over substance, of table-top war games played out against national and international backdrops. The personalities of yore had morphed into caricatures of themselves. The deluded and mentally challenged Orange One rules with a clammy fist in America. A babbling cripple and a scarecrow lead the political charge in the UK and it is only in France where politics, real politics rather than realpolitik, seems to be resurgent.

And here, Dear Reader, what do we have? Well politics in the classical sense never really took off in Pakistan, and once the bloody business of independence had faded to yesterday rather than all our tomorrows there quickly emerged the dominant political format — and not only of Pakistan but much of the subcontinent — elective feudalism. Those left holding the political baggage quickly realised that the best way to hold on to power was to prevent the lumpen proletariat from getting itself educated. Secondly, there was an urgent need to protect the status quo, the master-servant/serf relationship that yielded profits for generations. There had to be some tweaking at the edges, accommodations made with the military that occasionally had to intervene to keep the ship head to wind — and politics in any empowering and emancipated sense never took hold.

Today little has changed. There is a gaudy three-ring jamboree that is fed sweetmeats by a media keen to see performing animals bouncing across the screens nightly. There is a firmament populated with stars of varying luminosity, a few black holes and the occasional supernova. Most of them are gas giants, swirling atmospherics with little or nothing at the core, orbiting the dying sun of parliament that provides nothing more than a comfortable sinecure and a cockpit for periodic histrionics.

As for politics well it is a bit thin on the ground to be honest. Down somewhere at the bottom of the midden there are dutiful souls that are the remnants, the might-have-beens that struggle dutifully to better the lives of their fellow men and women. Yes dear reader, there really are good people if you dig deep enough and can hold your nose long enough to burrow through the ordure that covers them. But the vast pile they sit beneath is where the power is, and the power is going to make damn sure that the man or woman at the bottom is never going to break the surface, look around blinking and then turn into Liberty storming the barricades en route to the sacking of the Bastille. Oh dear me no…

And don’t get fooled by all the glittery bits either. The trimmings, that are laptop schemes and empty highways and power projects that will fire up, only to fall flat on their bijli bums when the decrepit transmission systems go ‘phut’ with the extra load. Look instead at how many more, as a proportion of the population, are functionally literate and have gainful employment. Or at the proportion of the female population that are educated beyond primary and how many of them have a job. A lot is different compared to my arrival on these shores in 1993 but there is very little that has changed. And politics? Steady as you go chaps and chapesses and remember the watchwords y’all. Let them eat cake.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 6^th, 2017.

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