Teetering on the brink

Unless there is a complete overhaul of the system, the 'gang of four' is likely to rule us for another 100 years.

There was a time in Pakistan when local news was censored; and if one wanted to know what was happening in the country, one switched on the Urdu news service of the BBC. It wasn’t just that the broadcasts were authentic reports of what was happening, but there was something about radio that was instantly compelling. The broadcasts were remote. Since one couldn’t see the face behind the voice and only one of the senses was being used, there were no diversions. The mind was fully alert.

These days we get our news from the local papers and the telly. But it is not quite the same thing when we learn about fresh disasters from those attractive female news announcers, whose faces are mobile only from the nose down, occasionally fighting for an expression and attempting to hide the odd twitch and subcutaneous vibration. A great advance from the dark ages of Ziaul Haq when females were forbidden to smile on TV.

For those lesser mortals like this writer, who do not have access to the Wikipedia storage tank or to the pir who meditates under a banyan tree in Mirpur Mathelo, who get most of the news about what is happening in the land of the pure from the local newspapers and the net.

An email that has recently been doing the rounds that could solve most of Pakistan’s financial problems arrived last week. A director of a Swiss bank is purported to have written, “Pakistanis are poor but Pakistan is not a poor country”.

According to him Rs28 trillion (28,000,000,000,000) have been deposited in Swiss banks over the years which could be used for tax free budgets for 30 years; provide jobs to millions of Pakistanis; construct four-lane roads from any village in Punjab to Islamabad; ensure the establishment of more than 500 social projects; provide financial assistance of Rs20,000 per month to every citizen for 60 years. And now comes the icing on the cake. Pakistan would no longer need World Bank and IMF loans!

Every time this writer reads an article which suggests this country is on the brink of a financial crisis, he withdraws and watches David Attenborough’s DVD of the Indian sage, especially the part where prominent leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, who had drunk deep at the well of jurisprudence, had collected to address a cross-section of enlightened Indian public opinion in a park in Bombay.

It was a bad time for the patriotic movement. There was a hint of rebellion in the air. Mr Jinnah, always upright, correct and constitutional carried the house when he said that the need of the hour was home rule and that India should strike out for it. He received rapturous applause. Mr Gandhi’s address was, by comparison, rather low key. But gradually he warmed up to his theme. He said that India was 700,000 villages, and not a handful of lawyers in Bombay and Delhi, who made speeches for each other and the liberal English magazines that granted them a few lines.

Unless the leaders stood shoulder to shoulder with the toiling masses in the broiling sun, India would never be free, for all they would be doing would be replacing one set of unrepresentative rulers with another, and they would never be able to challenge the British as one nation.

This is apparently what has been happening in Pakistan for the last 64 years, during which the country has been ruled by its own ‘gang of four’— the military, the bureaucracy, the feudals and the clergy. And unless there is a complete overhaul of the system, this is likely to continue for another 100 years. At the risk of sounding overtly cynical, except for a brief interlude, unrepresentative government appears to have been the theme of Pakistan’s constitutional history. If the constitutional lawyers have excelled in anything, it is in the field of legitimising extra-constitutional takeovers by men whose power and authority cannot be questioned.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 22^nd, 2011.