Failure of hope?

Hope is a potent human instinct that illuminates darkness and injects optimism into the pall of gloom. Despite its abstract and symbolic nature, hope manifests as an energy driving individual and social lives, compensating, if not undoing, the unpredictable variables of life. It sustains life’s journey by helping to persevere efforts against all odds. As a common human heritage, hope fortifies belief in facing present hardships for the promises of a brighter future. Without hope, there would be no dreams, efforts or social evolution. Undermining and systematically betraying hope, therefore, equates to dealing a serious blow to the spirit and existence of humankind.

However, the mere existence of hope rarely guarantees accomplishment; it’s the will and commitment of the empowered that bring it to fruition. Frequent roadblocks to public life and the betrayal of public trust render hope impotent. Against the backdrop of hopeless hope, life transforms into a dark abyss of uncertainty, inertia and lifelessness. In societies grappling with challenges on their evolutionary journey, only those prioritising public hope capitalise on and navigate them. In this context, governments reciprocate public trust through sincere and dedicated efforts, translating public hope into inclusive social prosperity.

Nevertheless, many countries, despite the façade of popularity they wear today, deliberately fail to reciprocate public hope, disguised as trust, in kind. Our society exhibits the classic characteristics of hopelessness and the betrayal of public trust. Many factors and actors behind the pall of hopelessness grappling with public lives today share the blame. National institutions and empowered individuals, encroaching on the national stakes, bear the greatest responsibility for the social despondency. The hope of public prosperity has faced repeated betrayal at the hands of the power elite. Amidst betrayals, hopes no longer shape our lives; it’s the other way around.

Ours is perhaps among the fewer democracies across history that exist at the sheer detriment of its own people. Successive regimes stood erected on the shoulders of the public to guard the lavishness and theft of a handful of elites sharing the authorisation power. Though the sustenance of life demands labour and the hope of its capitalisation, the powerful lot has thrived on public efforts and hope for over three quarters of a century. Unlike elsewhere, where hope, preceded by efforts, sustains beholders’ lives, here it sustains powerful perks. The repeated betrayals of public trust have made the public desperate. In desperation, false hope is given to the public to earn their trust again, translating this trust into sustaining megalomania and material gluttony. This vicious cycle continues to exist in our country.

In manifestation, institutions have overstepped constitutionally assigned bounds, orchestrating against the people of Pakistan for decades. Most people associated with and managing key national institutions have traded their souls for power and prestige. Hope for justice hangs strangled in the corridor of courts; truth in the houses of mainstream media; democracy in the porch of powers-that-be; health in the houses of healthcare; and public enlightenment in the glorification of systemically and selectively created ignorance.

Meanwhile, the hope for a welfare state suffocates at the gates of bureaucracy and enlightened theological values in the politicised pulpits of clergy. Nevertheless, not all hope is lost; it still exists in the hearts and minds of the megalomaniac elite. They still ignite public hope, only to betray them by satiating their unflinching gluttony and material indulgence. Therefore, both hopelessness and public hope are ultimately made to serve the parasitic elite. Don’t they?

The answer to long-held hopeless public hope lies in transferring national stakes to their real owners — the public. Though unprecedented in our tumultuous history, it is the only way to arrest the accelerating dive of society into the depths of degeneration. For that, no other opportunity than the upcoming general election offers prospects for breathing life into the moribund public hope.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 26^th, 2023.

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