New year: res-illusions and re-solutions

The sun has completed its final sprint for the year and has dived across the ocean that seemed stretched towards an eternity. The scarlet globe sank across the horizon leaving darkness behind while the boundless sea regressed to numberless streams. Every stream on its way forward came to face a consistent resistance from emerging marshes alongside all that tried to hinder it before it could culminate into the seemingly limitless water.

The stream of our consciousness seems much more dynamic. But, the marshes which infringe upon it are also much more impervious. These are the marshes of opinions which, having fed on once-upon-a-time circumstances, keep on flourishing and with this increasing growth transform into marshes of illusions that try to encroach upon existing time and vie for their dominance. What emerges more triumphant in this battle is an introspective nostalgia.

Our dilemma has been this introspective nostalgia that feeds upon figments of opinions lagging behind time and seemingly moving anti-clockwise. Such introspections challenge the decisions which are never revocable and the history which is never retrievable.

This introspective nostalgia becomes much more disastrous when it transcends from an individual to surround affiliations which are generally religious or political or religious-political. An ideology must survive time for its survival. It needs to be dynamic. And this dynamism needs a gradual and never-ending reconstruction.

One of the stubbornly persistent illusions we could not escape from so far has been our introspection on our national roots, with a latent desire to subvert history itself: what if the Partition had not occurred and we the Muslims inhabiting Pakistan now, had been part of the Sub-continent under the British or under some selected local government? See, our country is good only for a few million privileged people who enjoy the toil of so many other millions. Our neighbouring country, which is our rival, isn’t rich either. Its per capita income is just a little higher than ours. So, the Muslims of Pakistan and Bangladesh in an undivided India would have made a significant strength. This illusion still remains persistent in our religious-political arenas and has led to further divisions within these ideologies.

Illusions termed such because they disconnect us from reality, which is always in flux. The reality is that Pakistan emerged not merely as an ideological state but also as a geopolitical phenomenon connected with the post-colonisation process that had started long before the inception of this country. And the illusion about the hypothetically better position of the Muslims that could have been in an undivided India has altogether been shattered by Modi’s recent moves — first his revocation of the special status given to the people of India-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 and then his introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which by injecting religion into national policy reflects present-India’s betrayal with its founding fathers. Under these circumstances what we should mourn is our illusionary longing for an undivided India, an obsession which has crept into our unconscious mind. But this mourning would open another new schema for our introspections.

What, then, we need to learn from our present is that our religious-political thoughts need consistent reconstruction in order to be purged from persistent illusions, for an ideology fails to survive if it fails to keep up pace time. If we successfully cope with these challenges — and we can do so easily if we reconstruct our thoughts to make them as dynamic as time itself — our present will progress towards a luminous future rather than regressing towards an imagined past.

The crack of the new morning illuminates the streams out there. The impervious marshes are speedily joining the mainstream water that continues pacing along to join the ocean stretched onward to an eternity.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 30^th, 2019.

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