Modern democracy or one from the flea market?

Being just is being in conformity with what is upright and good. People will join in hordes to support a cause that is just and no power on earth can turn around the will of such people. History is filled with such examples where if there was a just cause to stand up and fight for, people stood up for it and fought and didn’t allow it to be shelved. Leaders are important because they are the creators of such ideas that appeal and the cause of which is just. Leaders publicise it and promote it and when that idea gets insulated by the will of the people it becomes difficult to crack it and break it.

All isms have been but ideas, and mankind has been searching for the best ways to live and rule themselves. From the clash between the church and the crown to the creation of empires and their dismemberment into nation states, mankind could never get tired of finding the best ways of living as a community, society and states. Not long ago, fascist states were ruled by autocratic leaders who imposed world wars on us and only in these two world wars over 100 million people died. These men and women did not willingly lose their lives, they sacrificed it to ensure that we could live in a better world. Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot have never been considered as leaders who could be praised as heroes. History always remembers them as villains that wanted to create their kind of world dictated by their world view of creation of fascist regimes and a fascist world in which their rule would remain unopposed and unchallenged.

Greatness emerges when it is exposed to a tough and competitive opposition. At personal level the greatest athlete of 20^th Century, Muhammad Ali would never have become such a great boxer and a world champion (not once but twice) if he didn’t have such remarkably able, competent and professional boxers such as Joe Frazier and George Foreman to fight against and beat. And at the level of empires and states, Ottoman Empire wouldn’t have ruled for over 600 years after it conquered Constantinople in 1523, if it didn’t have another powerful empire such as Byzantine to confront with and defeat. One may also not forget that it was the idea of the Caliph of that time to choose to fight on the German side in the World War-I that led to Ottoman Empire’s eventual defeat and dismemberment. That idea was not insulated by the will of the people but came down as a personal dictate by a ruler whose political idea, imagination, assumption and estimates went horribly wrong. Seen in the hindsight, we wouldn’t have the Sykes Picot or the Belfour declaration or even the kind of Middle East that has emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Even the US would not have become a great power had there not been USSR to challenge its hegemony and supremacy. The grand US strategy of containment and its Marshall Plan came into force only because it had a Soviet iron curtain to confront with.

History is a great teacher only if we are prepared to learn from it. My consistent view these days is not to call and address democracy as democracy but prefix the word modern with it first. It is only the ‘modern democracy’ that is functional democracy — the democracy that we see in our country is ‘landa bazar ki democracy’ i.e. a democracy of a bazar from where you can only buy low priced, used and cheap items.

I don’t know why the powerful people in our country have a problem with people standing up for a political idea that sounds to them just and appealing. What is wrong with reconsidering and reviewing the kind of democracy that exists in our country and which has miserably failed. There is nothing wrong with the choice of political system that we as people have chosen to govern our lives with. What is wrong is with the outdated ideas, leaders with old school of thought, the baby boomers who have made no attempt to relate to the world that has absolutely changed under the influence of the information age. The very fact that the government has disconnected and denied people connectivity by enforcing an absolute blockade on the internet speaks volumes about the mindset of the rulers that rule us. The cellular companies have experienced loss of millions of rupees and so have the other businesses. The mere fact that from ice age to the decades of 80s, in a period of almost 10,000 years, the world population increased to 3.9 billion and in the next forty years it almost doubled to almost 8 billion tells us about the kind of changed world we are living in and the kind of challenges we confront.

Many people like me at home or abroad have helplessly shed tears to witness the falling apart of our state in the last few days. We would do well to find out the reason why we have as a state hit the rock bottom. Separation of power is a democratic idea but practised only in modern democracies. In ‘landa bazar ki democracy’ power is accumulated and held in the hands of few people and institutions. Unless we learn to share power and make all our institutions autonomous that dispense their responsibilities without any political interference, we will never become a modern welfare state.

People’s power is the greatest power only when they are organised under a qualified, well-educated and dynamic leadership. Mediocre leadership converts people into a crowd whose potential can be least channelised. Not only this but if the state resorts to coercive means to eliminate the leader and deprive people of leadership than people no more remain a crowd, they take the shape of a mob. Leaderless and rudderless, they stop taking the road that would take them to a given destination and will take any road they think will take them there.

My request to the government is not to melt under the heat of the opposition that it is facing but fight with the intent of winning. If you lose, you will lose only because like Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ottoman Empire or Soviet Union you were not the best.

In modern democracies elections are not avoided but held in time. The baby boomers can come out with all the lopsided ideas to reject this but the people of Pakistan and especially the young generation no more relates to their cause which they think is unjust and unreasonable. Happiness comes not from having power and wealth, it only comes from being reasonable. Unreasonable people are the unhappiest people in the world. Your unreasonableness is making the people of Pakistan extremely unhappy.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2023.

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