Lalu Yadav as King Lear?

“How can we live, without our lives?”
John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath

I have borrowed the title of this column from a recent article by Uttam Sengupta, consulting editor of the National Herald, India. It is fascinating to understand why Sengupta has symbolically compared Lalu Yadav to King Lear.

King Lear is William Shakespeare’s 1605/06 play set in England. The monarch wants to step down and decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, but the biggest share to the one who loves him the most. The two older daughters flatter the king, but the youngest doesn’t know how to express her love. So, the king gives the flatterers half the kingdom each and in anger disowns the youngest. In due course, the king goes mad because of the mistreatment he receives from his two elder daughters and finally dies of sadness and depression.

Lalu Yadav’s eldest daughter is a member of the Rajya Sabha and two of his sons are legislators in Bihar. Lalu Yadav, himself, is in jail now, sentenced by an anti-corruption court on corruption charges. What will become of him in the end is the drop scene of this real-life play — one can only guess.

Coming back to Sengupta’s unique perspective on contemporary politics, he writes: “The glee with which urban, middle-class India greeted the conviction of Lalu Yadav, a former chief minister of Bihar, in the fodder scam comes as no surprise. In a country where convictions of the rich and powerful are few, the conviction of a powerful leader like Lalu is cathartic. It sends out the message that there is rule of law that ‘Be you ever so high, the law is always above you’. It reinforces the impression that justice has been done and that for once, a corrupt politician in a land full of corrupt politicians has got his comeuppance.”

Common folks and some honest legislators all over the world are recently rallying against the corruption of vested interest-based leaderships. For example, in South Africa, the ruling party is pressuring President Jacob Zuma to step down so that his deputy, Cyril Ramaposa, can take charge of national affairs management to stamp out corruption and restore investor confidence in the economy. And last Saturday, tens of thousands of Romanians protested against legislation enacted by parliament to make it harder to prosecute crime and high-level corruption.

In the context of contemporary Pakistan, the pertinent question is: will the common people of this country, the poverty-stricken majority and the middle-class horribly hard-pressed by the dismal economic ground realities thereby losing socio-economic status, react with the same glee and gratification of which Sengupta has so authoritatively written about in the case of Lalu Yadav? Will the Pakistani awam decisively support and readily accept the consequential outcome of the ongoing process of accountability and the ‘state auto-correcting’ itself, even if it ends up with strict administrative and legal sanctions and judicial convictions against all of the accused national affairs managers? That is the big question. Can the awam conceptualise the idea that we are ‘one nation’ and the interests of Pakistan, the state, are higher than our own personal loyalties and vested interests? That is what will decide our fate as a nation.

However, before we come to this decisive moment, it is imperative to ascertain what the awam want to happen in this country. Is the political leadership going in that direction? Is the present political discourse headed towards that goal?

How many of Pakistan’s ruling elite, fatly paid TV talk show hosts, influential journalists or wealthy media group owners, public policy managers or crafty public opinion-makers ever ask the common citizens what they expect of the holy cow called democracy?

The frightfully deprived masses of this nation would say that they want ‘quick fix’ solutions to their daily problems. They would say that they want reasonably priced and unadulterated food, and medicine and readily accessible health services, electricity, gas, petrol and transport services available to run their daily lives and an affordable education. They would tell you that they want ‘justice’ dispensed to local communities and an end to rampant corruption and social oppression.

They would tell you that they want a vibrant nation taking a leadership role in creative arts, technological innovation, scientific development, medical research and human resources development. They would tell you that they want a moral-ethical society and a tolerance for one another with socio-economic equilibrium. They would tell you that they are a nation of poets, ‘fakirs’, saints and ‘qalandars’, and they want their heritage given back to them.

They would tell you that they are tired of political charades conducted on a daily basis by their ruling so-called democratic leadership and the media. They would tell you that they abhor the visibly observable national disintegration and failing national solidarity. They would tell you that they have lost trust in the prevailing system of public representation, and their confidence in existing public representatives is close to ‘zero’.

They would tell you that they are hopelessly dismayed at the continuing and ever-expanding incompetence, inefficiency and organisational incapability of their national political managers.

Indeed, a democracy cannot be wedded to orthodox ideas and worthless doctrines. It ought to be a vibrant, self-correcting, self-adjusting, optimal force of an inherent political organism that determines its own directions of political-economic innovations, systemic changes and overall socio-political transformations on a national scale. It ought to change its foreign policy directions on pragmatic national parameters and regularly adjust its domestic policy planning accordingly.

It needs to be pointed out clearly that the massive poverty at the awam level is directly the result of corruption on an immense scale and usurpation of national resources by the political-economic elite, bureaucracy, state institutions and so on. So, “can we live without our lives?” That is the question the awam is asking the entire political leadership.

Who will be King Lear in the 21^st century Pakistan? Your guess is as good as mine.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 26^th, 2018.

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