Imagined sovereignty — II

How about reclaiming our imagined sovereignty by allowing our rulers the luxury and greatness of poverty?

We feed our people the diet of national honour and integrity to ensure that they remain in a peaceful slumber, oblivious to the dangers to which their rulers have exposed them. What is useless prosperity when we can boast the new Hatf –VIII, which can carry conventional and nuclear arsenal and travel up to 350 kilometres to deliver its deathly load. If we are hungry, we can always feast our eyes upon the spectacular sight of a Hatf, Ghauri, Shaheen or other techno-morbid machine tearing across the sky, reassuring us of our ultimate safety and warning the enemy about its imminent demise.

God help those misguided fools who think that prosperity is the strongest defence a nation can have. The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) nations are just too brainless to think that economic development and prosperity are the best safeguards against terrorism and insurgency because a prosperous people have a stake in the system. I admit that I was one of those naive simpletons, who believed that the best way to create patriotic and national sentiments is to give people a stake because they don’t like to oppose a system that delivers. When you have economic well-being and prosperity, why would you want to upset the applecart? When you deny people basic rights and access to services, why should they want to protect and defend the system, the country, the nation? But no, we learn now that prosperity is the ‘other’ of national honour, so poverty is purity! Abundance is evil, want and hunger is noble!

How about reclaiming our bygone imagined sovereignty by allowing our rulers, both civil and military, the luxury and greatness of poverty? Let’s claim useless prosperity for ourselves so that our leaders can enjoy being noble, pure and poor. After all, they work so hard to keep us poor and themselves well fed. We are violating their right to be hungry and sovereign. And they love being sovereign, an idea associated in the past with kings and absolute monarchs. And if prosperity means that we, the people, would be a bit more wicked, somewhat less noble and not very sovereign, let’s go for it anyway. It is time to switch places with them and enjoy forbidden fruits.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 6^th, 2011.