Social disruption and our politics
The writer is a member of the faculty of contemporary studies at NDU, Islamabad
Information age passed by us and we as a country stood on the sidelines and watched. Early 90s which was the beginning of this age was also the beginning of a period of new democracy in Pakistan. Had the two political parties — the PML-N) and the PPP — not wasted that decade of politics in destabilising each other’s governments, we like much of the rest of the world could have built on the core democratic values of freedom, liberty and equality. Information age brought about an explosion of freedom of choice and while the people and the society were free and willing to make those choices, politics in this country was not; it was busy destabilising existing governments. The result people liberated politics didn’t.
Sad part of the history is that it was not just the information age from which we could not take benefit, the early 90s was also the beginning of the period of ‘great disruption’ and we were least prepared to see it coming. As the people felt free to make more choices, the physical capital, the human capital and the social capital shifted gears. A huge shift in the societal norms took place challenging the existing customs, traditions, limits, boundaries and rules. People were exposed to multiculturalism that was brought from outside world through internet to their doorsteps. No government, even the military government of Gen Musharraf, invested in the social capital and it nose-dived; and the war on terror further marginalised and removed it and the importance of investing in it from the political radar screen.
It is extremely easy to measure social capital. One can do that by looking at crime rate, family breakdowns, suicide rates, divorces, rates of unemployment, cases of rapes, tax evasion and even increased cases of litigation in a society. For the past few days, the case of the rape of an unfortunate woman on the motorway dominated the news headlines. While the discussion revolved around the inability of the ‘crime protectors’ to safeguard public life to the ability of ‘crime generators’ to commit heinous crimes in the broad daylight, little or no discussion took place on the social disruption caused by our lack of investment in the social capital. The western world believes that the best form of crime control is when civil society socialises so much that it produces young men and women to obey laws not under state pressure and control but through informal community pressures. What was done in the democracies of Athens and Greece is true even today. There is no substitute of community politics, autonomy of power and its decentralisation leading to community policing. Community appointed crime controllers responsible not only for crime control but steering the violators back into the mainstream society. Introducing such a system is not a rocket science and in such a system a community that takes the responsibility of its own wellbeing essentially ends up settling many issues through handshakes rather than taking them to the courts.
We failed. Our politics failed and me and every one of my generation — whether he or she likes it or not — failed this country. I say so because we allowed our social and democratic values to be disrupted and although we are making a great comeback, the social disorder that makes us close to a dysfunctional society in some areas speaks of how politics is a name that in this country can easily be associated with wasted time and opportunities.
Politics and people moved in different lanes in this country. In the fast lane social movements demanded liberty, equality, social justice and human rights. In the lazy and slow moving political lane politics could not decide what could be the right pattern of social adjustment to the economic modernisation being offered by the information age in the globalised world. Could it be keeping our children outside the fold of mainstream education? Could the social disruption be averted by educating our children by providing them one dimensional religious education in madrassas? Could the return to religious orthodoxy or any form of orthodoxy be a solution to our social disruption? Or keeping 25 million children out of schools or having ghost teachers and ghost schools? I would like to stop it here and only wonder loudly — “Can these politicians who are collectively responsible for our social disruption and social disorder think that they can hold an All Parties Conference and people will take whatever they say seriously?”
Beginning the Information age, like all cultures of the world, ours also got exposed to the outside world but our politics didn’t shield and protect it. That could have been done by timely resisting the social disruption. The word culture is associated with the concept of choice and while the people can make choices about the languages, food, dress and their behaviours, politics also needed to make a choice of protecting the core values of our culture.
Asian values and more particularly ours are quite different from the Western ones. When a police officer spoke about them, all hell broke loose. But are the women and men not treated differently in our country under the labour laws? In the West and even by the social movements moving in fast lanes, in Pakistan this is considered as gender discrimination but would we allow our women to work on holidays and late night?
Lastly, how can we now re-build social capital? One thing is given — social order is not hierarchal and never proceeds top-down. It is an outcome of a horizontal process of interconnectedness and interdependence resulting through negotiations, dialogues, arguments and even disagreements. But when politics is not able to create an enabling environment to achieve this, all that the resulting social disorder does is make us all Hobbessians — Thomas Hobbes the author of Leviathan suggested in a natural environment of ‘war of all against all’, the State must act as a great monster to impose order. This country still needs the State to play this role.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 20th, 2020.
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