Failed Deng Xiaoping’s of this country

As we still need state as a Leviathan for nation building and for national security

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is a book translated from Latin to English language by CM Smith. The period is 450 BC, but anyone who is interested in politics and military warfare this is a must read. When I heard the former PM Nawaz Sharif’s speech in the all parties’ conference (APC), I was immediately reminded of what Thucydides writes in this book about speeches. He writes: “What may befall from fortune cannot be determined by the speeches.”

“Our future is worth creating” was not an idea written in Greek that it could not be read, understood and conceived. Democracy’s great knights and their parties, the PML-N and the PPP failed to implement this idea and left us a country in complete chaos and uncertainty. If this was not enough the recent speeches made in the APC demonstrate that some of these democratic knights are not even on the right side of our national security. Acting as the antidote to national optimism, which basically is the belief in future of this country, all that the opposition has done is yet again create an environment of poor democracy and through it set a platform from where some of the ‘bad democratic actors’ can flourish and even promote their interests.

These great architects of our democracy, our failed Deng Xiaoping’s and the authors of ‘revenge of democracy’ in this country, have got it all wrong. Ask the Chinese and they will tell you why. These ‘political freedom seekers’ who want freedom from all the influences misread the meaning of freedom in this information age. Whereas the entire world is talking of connectivity and engagement, these ‘vertical thinkers’ — absolutely detached and disconnected with the inspirations of the people — speak of disconnectedness and disengagement. These accumulators of political power based on their ever-increasing private wealth gave absolutely no ‘economic freedom’ to the people. All they have done is ask for more and more democracy and political freedom. Before Tiananmen, the Chinese believed that freedom was 90 per cent political and 10 per cent economic. In the rising China of today, freedom is 90 per cent economic and only 10 per cent political. The complete freedom that democracy enjoyed during the democracy decade (2008-2018) gave us no economic freedom — in fact gifted us a country under huge foreign debt.

What did politics do with the 100 per cent political freedom it had during the democracy decade? Through this freedom they made their rule absolute and started treating the national economy as their household economy. For all economic activities, the outside world had to go through their pockets. They surrounded themselves only with those who were willing to put up with such corruption — the so-called gatekeepers that they appointed ensured that every economic deal (after extracting substantial bribe) went only through a single door — their door.

These ‘grabbers of political power’ on behalf of the people should never raise their voices for seeking any political freedom for whatever freedom they already had they gave us or our children nothing in return. While they were busy filling their pockets during the democracy decade, the military was engaged in crisis response activity. Its multiple engagements and the sacrifices that the military gave during these decades is more than in any previous decades in the history of our country. Sitting on the sidelines now and raising hue and cry about unfair play is absolutely comical. Why was politics unfair when they ruled this country? Why were all wrong methods employed to force military to submit to political authority?

Instead of sitting with the military and discussing with them and deliberating their response on the emerging threats to the fast changing security environment in the region, the politics of opposition propagates not to conduct any dialogue with the military. Are we not living in a ‘more dangerous world’ than ever before? Why suggest that politics should divorce military only because you want ‘your good old days back’? Is this the best strategy that the grand political and democratic strategists of the opposition could come up with? In fact the speeches made by the political leadership in APC qualify all of them for a failing grade in their political and strategic vision.

After 2018 elections, Pakistan left one era behind and entered a new era which is now defined by a national commitment that resonates with the theme that ‘the future is worth creating’. In this era there is no room for ‘empire building politics’ in which blood and family matter more than people with talent and merit. The time for ‘chaos creators’, the seekers of political power through ill-gotten private wealth and those seeking their own selfish paths to happiness are fast coming to an end through the process of accountability in this country.

The participants of APC are desperate to create political space for themselves. Politically cornered and facing corruption charges, they now hardly want to serve democracy. They instead want to set it up for confrontation. The government will have to be politically more stringent than ever before as the participants of APC may have no love lost for order in this country. Their conduct may be as disorderly in coming future as their speeches have been during the APC.

Before the divorce papers are finally filed, partners in a difficult marriage continue to drag their marital relationship. During all this time they know that their marriage is already dead. The marriage of opposition leaders in the APC is similar to such a marital relationship and it is most likely to meet soon its predetermined decline and divorce. They have been neglecting and insulting the true values of democracy in the past, and their current political get-together has not been actuated by their concern for the people but because of their own private interests. What bothers them is not that they have been wronged, they are actually not accustomed to be questioned and all this political alliance against democracy is nothing but a waste of time influenced chiefly by their fears and self-interests rather than by their honour.

We still need state as a Leviathan for nation building and we definitely need state as a Leviathan for national security. In politics, as in arts, the new must prevail upon the old and I am glad that the politics of status quo in this country is being finally shown the door. We will have to bear with the slowness of the political, social and economic reforms being introduced by this government as all good things take time and also history tells us that ‘unregulated speed in the beginning more often results in delay in ending’.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 27^th, 2020.

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