KARACHI: In her excellent article of January 12 “Suffering fools gladly”, Amina Jilani puts the whole thing in a nutshell in her opening paragraph, which reads: “Holding regular elections, claim the hard-core democrats, is the indispensable learning process that leads to a democratic polity. Election after election will weed out the baddies and slowly but surely the goodies will take over. Well, in Pakistan, the track record does not bear this out (so far). Election after election that has been held since 1988 has only served to prop up the old saying quoted often enough, attributed to Founder-Maker Mohammad Ali Jinnah in one of his more realistic moods: that each successive government will be worse than its predecessor.”
And in the second paragraph, she explains why this is so, saying “In our case, what ballot-box democracy does is legitimise and entrench the status quo — particularly problematical in feudal, semi-feudal, tribal and authoritarian nations.”
And the title of the article aptly describes the state of mind of most of us: obviously, people suffering fools gladly cannot be much different themselves either, for allowing all this to happen and gladly, too, not seeing anything wrong at all in the sordid drama.
We have fallen to such depths of degradation that if someone, distressed over the prevailing and ever-worsening state of affairs risks his life and returns to Pakistan to wake us up from our deep slumber and asks us to demand an improvement in the situation, which is our right, barring his ardent supporters, a vast majority — many intellectuals included — and most leaders of political parties, describe his act as mutinous and anarchist, label it as advancing someone’s agenda to derail democracy, which is an impossibility: you can’t derail democracy which, in our case, never got on the rails and has been running off-track all the time. There are some who declare unhesitatingly that they do support the cause but refuse to be a part of the movement, disputing its timing and that they had not been consulted in advance. Well, if our traditional leaders had been clear in their thinking and were capable of coming up with useful suggestions and measures, we would not have been where we unfortunately find ourselves 65 years after independence.
There are others who were very loud in their support of Dr Tahirul Qadri, even participated in a big way in his Lahore rally and while still pledging moral support to the movement, declined at the last moment to participate in the Long March physically, citing threats of large-scale terrorist attacks like those in Quetta and Mingora. Well, the fatalities due to feared terrorist attacks could not be higher than the hundreds of thousands of people who died during the freedom struggle as well as in riots around Partition. If all those sacrifices were considered worthwhile, how could it be considered a sensible move to avoid sacrifice on a much smaller scale if that could help in achieving the objectives which were behind the creation of Pakistan: a welfare state for the Muslims of the region, as well as those of other religions, who choose to stay amongst us and not the one devoted solely to the ‘welfare’ of the ruling elite at the cost of others. Also, by refusing to make sacrifices now, we are nullifying and degrading the massive sacrifices made earlier on so that others could have a better future.
While the attitude of leaders of major parties working in close cooperation for their mutual welfare, as well as of some smaller, free-floating parties who habitually join just about anyone who is in power, for similar considerations, was very much predictable, that of others who promised revolutionary change, and yet others who rose from the middle class and claim to champion the cause of the common man, is very shocking indeed. If they don’t have the courage to join an ongoing revolutionary movement, how can they be expected to start one themselves, which could require planning and sacrifices, on a much larger scale?
SRH Hashmi
Published in The Express Tribune, January 15th, 2013.
