How to heal a nation

The people have spoken. Imran Khan is slated to be the next prime minister of Pakistan. He has already delivered his victory speech in which he came out with a magnanimous message best suited for a victor. How much can he deliver on these promises is still to be seen. Let us wish him well. But there is no gainsaying that this country is deeply and excruciatingly polarised. This piece is meant to address the societal fracture we have endured for years and how to get rid of it.

One great gift of democracy is its ability to heal. However, that is not what we have seen in Pakistan in the past ten years. In this decade, intolerance seems to have grown and society appears to have been divided into two irreconcilable wholes. Many explanations can be given. Sign of times? Global phenomenon? Well, maybe. But it goes way back. What you are witnessing right now has fermented for ten years. The first assessment was the anger that stemmed from Musharraf’s holdovers disenfranchised by his removal from power. However, a close examination disproves this notion.

Two factors stand out when you care to look. The first is this incredible pain which refuses to go away. A nation that has lost over 70,000 citizens to terrorism, with literally countless injured and permanently disabled, does not know how to handle this pain. War fatigue and battle bruises when mistreated lead to anger and paranoia. Add to it the sense of betrayal. The saga of Musharraf’s rule needed a closure. In this space and elsewhere, I implored politicians to come up with the needed narrative and a remedy. In hindsight, for you he might have abrogated the Constitution twice but there is no dearth of people who still look up to him. Sadly, politicians proved they were out of their depth here. No closure. It kept festering like a long-ignored wound.

And the second factor complicates the matter further. The baggage, the stubbornness and the ineptness of the political governments. The People’s Party’s government could not handle the economy. It went south. And then its harebrained antics, for instance, attempt to bring an external intelligence agency under the interior ministry did not win it any laurels. Finally came the worst blow, the tale of the memo, where it was learnt that the government was trying to lobby a foreign government’s power circles to manage the domestic civil-military imbalance. You have seen how it played out in the media and the court. Now conduct a thought experiment. Imagine how it must have played out among those who were tasked to combat terrorism. Bedlam.

Now, about the PML-N. Electing Nawaz Sharif as prime minister was a leap of faith. A humungous one. Nawaz Sharif was removed from power by Musharraf’s coup and there was no way to dismiss chances of vendetta. But in some cases, this daring, bold endeavour paid off. The PM grudgingly owned the war on terror. Consequently, we have managed to marginalise the terrorists. Likewise, the economy seemed to be moving in the right direction. For a heartbeat. But most economists kept protesting the cruder aspects of what is now known as the Darnomics. Macroeconomic stabilisation came but at a chaotic and troubling cost. And then in the end it vanished with the departure of Ishaq Dar. But what got them in the end was an attempt to politicise a case of assets-beyond-means which they failed to defend legally. Mian Sahib had no serious issues with the dynamics of civil-military relations, at least not visibly so, until Panama Papers case surfaced and became too hard to handle. The system kept throwing him lifelines. He repeatedly dropped the ball. Inquiry. TORs. Superior court’s dismissal of the petition. But Mian Sahib did not agree to a political solution. When it went to the court, he was again offered opportunities. The bench was reconstituted owing to the retirement of a chief justice. There was ample time for the former premier to find a political solution. Yet again, no luck. You realise how much of it was sheer ineptness and good old lethargy? But hey, how about doing nothing and blaming it on the soldiers? And thus, came the civil-military narrative. The Dawn leaks. Domestic acrimony grew. The international media bought it. But here in Pakistan it proved futile on the Election Day.

Not everyone has the patience to offer the political class endless opportunities. A whole host of such friends sit in the media and tell you how a majority of politicians is nothing more than a gang of petty thugs. It is exaggeration of course. But for the fainthearted and the inept it creates an unending list of impediments. When ignorance converts into hubris, it can have devastating effects. And it did.

Please do not misconstrue for a second that I mean to trivialise the reaction from the other side. Nor that there were no mistakes from the other side. I am just looking at a fracture and pointing how the people we elected could have done better. In a royal rumble, not all blows are fair. The point is all of this was unnecessary and could have easily been avoided. We all live in the same country. We all have similar aspirations for the country. A more resourceful person could do much more to bridge the gap. A careful but intelligent dialogue could unite the nation. But that did not happen.

In the tug of war that we have seen in the past 10 years, our injured, our tired and our poor are the most neglected. The soldiers, the cops and even civilians who sacrificed their lives or their body parts were not properly celebrated as heroes by politicians. There were rituals. But without a soul.

The new government is in luck. It is trusted by many of our estranged brothers and sisters. When it comes to power, they feel empowered. But the new government can do few important things to repair the fracture. Reach out to the opposition. Be truly magnanimous because most of the vindictiveness stems from the second floor of power not the top floor where Imran will sit. Upgrade its narrative on the fight against terror and embrace our heroes. Uphold the same standards of justice for its own so that no space for misplaced victimhood remains. And then work on the agenda of better governance that it has promised.

If the new government can rise up to this challenge, we may soon bury this polarisation for good. Godspeed. 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2018.

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