Brand Pakistan and our declining national mood

There can be victory in defeat as well. Pakistan’s image or ‘brand Pakistan’ was deeply damaged when Sri Lankan national Priyantha Kumara was assaulted and killed by a vicious mob in Sialkot. This incident inflicted a terrible harm on the national conscience. It resulted in a great loss of goodwill and left the entire nation demoralised and sad. However, national response following the incident was admirable and helped lift the national spirit from the depth of sadness and shame.

The national hero, Malik Adnan, who has been nominated for the prestigious bravery award Sitarae-Jurat, beautifully summed up the sense and mood of the entire nation when he said, “This incident will act as a turning point in the history of our nation and will change the thinking of our entire nation.” The business community of Sialkot collected hundred thousand dollars for Priyantha’s family, the government announced lifetime salary for the deceased, and the entire ulema community joined hands to condemn the incident. But to top this all, in a quick effort to dispense justice, all the culprits were arrested. Surely, all of them will meet their well-deserved end and hopefully Pakistan will be able to demonstrate to the entire world its commitment to the dispensation of speedy justice. There is no disgrace in falling down, it is the getting up with good grace that matters more.

Those attempting to decline the national mood of the country are many and they waste no opportunity to spread their ill found assumption about this great nation by promoting their favourite theme that a “bad ending is inevitable”. They do this every time something bad happens but such incidents, as Malik Adnan said, are not an end but a beginning. We need to set ourselves free from this “mood of declinism” that is being carefully crafted as a web around our national spirit.

In economics, Gresham’s law — Sir Thomas Gresham was financial agent of Queen Elizabeth I — is a monetary principle which states that “bad money drives out good”. But unlike Sir Gresham, our “money makers” — our Supreme Court has called some of them by the name of Sicilian mafia — believe that “bad information drives out good information”. Some of their paid liars consistently try to create an illusion of their manufactured truth. These illusions of truth are disappointing and are being purposefully famed to hurt the national self-esteem.

All Sicilian mafias in our country have their Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, who have been tasked to follow his strategy: “repeat a lie so often that it becomes the truth”. Some of these Goebbels sit on our electronic media and also make use of other social mediums to churn out “their illusions of truth” to mask the real truths. These are our actual villains who for the want of “some recognition” and some of Gresham’s defined “bad money” are creating hurdles for our nation-state as it tries to get up and recover from the state of decay it experienced when it fought the costly War on Terror.

The hard truth is that every nation goes through the process of blossoming and decay. But as long as nations can retain their resilience to change, they not only survive but also prosper. Two sets of authors answered the question of why nations fail in two very popular and widely read books. First, Paul Kennedy wrote in the Rise and Fall of Great Powers that “nations stumble when their manufacturing base can no longer produce the funds needed to maintain their military strength.” Second, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote in Why Nations Fail that it is “the weakness of independent institutions which allows government itself to be an extractive industry”. Our military is one of the best in the world and is not easily threatened by a “manufacturing base that cannot produce funds needed to maintain its military strength”. Instead, it is under attack from within, by pseudo patriots posing as political leaders who do so not because the military is at fault but because they are not accustomed to being held accountable or answerable to anyone. The more their “royal-ness and political grandeur” slips from under their feet, the more they assault the powerful institution that is bound to back any government in power.

Emancipation of civil life from state power is ideal and a very powerful social concept that helps create a shackled state accountable and answerable to the public. But in Pakistan, where local versions of Norway’s Anders Breivik and Newland’s Breton Harrison Tarrant are still likely to pop up, the state has to remain powerful for a considerable period of time and even use coercive measures to resist any tyranny with force. Those that earmark 23rd March, the Pakistan Resolution Day, as the day of protest march to Islamabad are the creators and shapers of the “declining national mood” in this country. A day on which Pakistan promotes its own brand and image of a powerful nuclear state which is ready to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be spoiled by these “national brand spoilers”. History has shown us that nations have not perished from the margins. More often, it was the centre that could not hold. This tendency of marching to the centre has become a state weakness and it is necessary that the state must now draw a clear red line about it.

We give credit to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for lifting 800 million Chinese citizens above the poverty line but we often forget that he was also the same leader who sent troops against the students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing more than a thousand in order to stamp out the idea that economic deregulation — which was the basis of elimination of poverty — might mean diluted political control. Patience is a virtue but any leader who lacks “ruthlessness” as a leadership quality will struggle to create order in a society and execute any promised reforms. No trouble should escape the wrath of the state and all of them must be treated with the ruthlessness that they deserve.