Holier than thou!

We never hesitate to cast the first stone, even if the ‘sinner’ has done nothing other than what we do on daily basis.

We Pakistanis suffer from a heavy dose of the ‘holier than thou’ syndrome. We never hesitate to cast the first stone, no matter even if the ‘sinner’ had done nothing other than what we do on a daily basis. Even I seem not to have escaped the affliction or I would not have penned this judgmental column. It is too taxing a matter to sit on the judgment of others, especially your own countrymen. But we simply relish doing just that, conveniently ignoring how others are judging us.

Ask anyone in uniform and he will disparage the entire lot of his country without even a single qualification. Ask him how many wars he has won, he will come up with a number of excuses — none of them would be strategic. The civil servant would be equally harsh on the uniformed as well as the un-uniformed. Ask him who created the economic and the energy mess; he would point his finger at everyone except himself. Ask any politician and he will blame the civil-military bureaucracy (CMB) and would also attribute his own failures and weaknesses to the CMB’s shenanigans. And you will find the politician suspecting even his own shadow and would see him running from it all the time even when in power. The media harangues the nation round the clock, day and night, without even a pause to see how its menacing clout is being used by the media owners and the ‘influential’ staffers or how many media workers have not been paid their salaries for months together. The Bar sits on the judgment of the judiciary; even attacks judges in the courtrooms. And the judiciary plays to the gallery.

We also suffer from oversized egos. We can do no wrong. That is the self-image we love to draw of ourselves. Kashmir is a disputed territory not because we did not act the way we should have in time but because India tricked us into such a position. Bangladesh happened not because we ignored the natural aspirations of the people of the then largest province of Pakistan but because the Indian Army torpedoed our doctrine of defending East Pakistan by engaging India on the West Pakistan borders. We suffer from militancy today because the US had walked away from the region, burdening us with jihadists after the collapse of the Soviet Union and not because we tried to use these very jihadists to bleed India in Kashmir instead of getting rid of them immediately after the US left. We suffer the blowback not because we funded, trained and inspired these militants to wage jihad in Indian Kashmir but because the US is not helping us replace its puppet government in Kabul with a brand new one of our own. Our economy is down and out because the dole tap has been turned off by those who are ‘blackmailing’ Pakistan to accept Indian hegemony in the region and also a role for New Delhi in the Afghanistan endgame and not because we do not collect taxes from our rich who continue to get richer by evading not only taxes but also by pilfering gas, power, water and deliberately defaulting on bank loans while our poor continue to get poorer.

We suffer from a baffling degree of superiority complex, which is fed continuously by drawing on the ‘golden’ periods of Arab, Turkish and Iranian history. Our claims to these glorious legacies of other nations are justified on the debatable argument that we, too, belong to the same faith as these nations, ignoring completely the fact that we are neither Arabs, nor Turks and not even Iranians — our closest neighbours whose language had had a profound impact on our official language, Urdu, but without having any lasting impact on our subcontinental culture, a culture which remained largely unaffected even by the several hundred years of Mughal rule.

We are intolerant to the point of being unholy, cold-bloodedly devilish. We kill to settle all kinds of disputes even when we disagree on issues of faith. We are perhaps the world’s champion hypocrites. We hate the US, but line up at courier service counters by the thousands for a US visa. We hate India, but love everything Bollyhood — movies, songs and ads!

Published in The Express Tribune, January 30^th, 2013.