Moving the goalposts

Pakistan has perfected an art the civilised world hasn't yet mastered: resolving crises without confronting them. While it admirably plays mediator to global conflicts, it reserves a different strategy for domestic ones - not resolution, but redefinition. Problems are not solved; they are reframed until they cease to appear as problems on paper. Success metrics are not achieved; they are revised until achievement becomes inevitable. The goalpost, in short, is never fixed - and a moving goalpost, by design, is never missed.

For 78 years, succeeding governments have promised to address the issues afflicting the masses - yet the issues have only aggravated and multiplied. This doesn't always suggest their incompetence or unwillingness, but rather their mandated efficiency. Since the preceding regimes didn't succeed in arresting, let alone addressing, the issues facing the people, the incumbent has shouldered the role with utmost commitment. However, it feels the need for its empowerment by doing away with all that could obstruct the ruling machinery: democracy, justice and freedom of expression.

Empowered, the ruling elite has largely started redefining the issues - some implicitly and the rest explicitly. For they acknowledge, if you can't fight a battle, redefine its terms of engagement and success, you will never find yourself defeated. Or, to twist the words of Sun Tzu, the supreme strategy of resolving an issue is addressing it without confronting it. This government, for all its experience and mandate and having rejected the failures of its predecessors, has learned a lesson in pragmatism. That is, all that afflicts the ruling elite, threatens their stakes or obstructs their vested interests needs to be cleared and rooted out. All that haunts the ruled needs to be negotiated and their threshold redefined, to two ends: absolving the rulers of their responsibility of fixing the issues facing the people; and leaving the people to fend for themselves.

The corruption, for instance, has been considerably and institutionally reduced by increasing its threshold and narrowing the NAB mandate. It is, in fact, a grand check against corruption. The same holds for poverty. China took nearly two decades and spent trillions to lift millions out of poverty, while Brazil took over a decade and enormous resources to alleviate poverty.

Lately, the incumbents have intended to bring down the real poverty rate by minimally raising the per capita income threshold to Rs8,484 a month. The revised threshold means an individual earning 284 bucks a day is not poor. For the policymakers, individuals live as if they were in an eremitic state. Worse, 284 bucks isn't the fate of everyone in the lower strata of society.

Yet, against all the goalpost shifting, poverty has climbed to 28.9 from 21.9 recorded in 2018-19. This suggests a horrifying reality: every third person is multidimensionally poor in the country. Corruption and poverty aren't the only issues this government seems to be committed to resolving. It has already redefined the threshold of democracy, the constitution, and civilian space. For instance, democracy is being redefined as everything with a democratic cloak: constitution anything but its spirit, rule of law as rule of power, and rulers' rights as inalienable human rights. Similarly, offence is not a violation of the laws by power but both their deviance and compliance by the people.

Injustice isn't unfair treatment of the people but fair treatment in our society. Since fairness defies power and vested interests, it has been rightly redefined. The same is being implicitly and explicitly rewritten to reflect declining morality, freedom of expression, education, transparency, patriotism, national interests, public services and truth.

The developed world, having spent decades and billions actually solving problems, might do well to reconsider. There is a far more efficient method - and our leadership has mastered it. The envy, one suspects, would be considerable.