The fascist streak within us

Our pursuit of old-fashioned, outdated, undemocratic models, ideas ensure that we remain reactionary, highly paranoid.

There’s something peculiar about hero worship in the Islamic Republic. We seem to fall in love with the first dictator who steps in to usurp our rights. Actually, this country should be a tourist attraction for the students of Praetorianism and Bonapartism; a nation which not only welcomes dictators but also goes into a decade-long sleep during their tenures, takes no time in issuing performance deadlines at the very beginning of each democratic order.

In popular narrative, democracy is often used as a synonym for corruption, elitism, ineptness, lack of patriotism and more recently, growing extremism. Astoundingly, we overlook the fact that the lack of transparency during dictatorial rule implies that these evils actually stem from the times of autocrats. Ideally, democracy should offer considerable transparency to ensure that none of these evils prevail for long. However, I am no apologist for the bad governance witnessed during the past democratically elected set-ups, which proves that there is more than just a grain of truth in the scepticism towards such orders too. However, what beats me is how conveniently we remember the mistakes of the democratic governments, while ignoring or even, at times, glamourising the follies of the dictators.

Is it possible that we are so infernally in love with the idea of one powerful ruler that we chose to ignore all his shortcomings? Or is it because of our desire to cover our cowardice during such regimes that our selective amnesia chooses to forget all our sufferings during the autocratic rule? These explanations are much too simplistic, although not entirely untrue, for our complex problem. Both love and fear show that there is an age-old conditioning at play. This is why, every dictator invests heavily in propaganda and the projection of a softer image that a civilian ruler can hardly even dream of.

When, after their long stints in power, these dictators leave, they leave behind weak democratic set-ups that cannot expose this narrative for what it is for one reason or another. This narrative, in the garb of our official history, is protected by a state that, in essence, is its biggest victim. But this, too, is only half of the problem. There are deeper undercurrents in our collective historical experience that might explain the other half.

Pakistan, we know, was almost single-handedly carved out of India by a politician whose fondness for democracy is well known. But behind the simple fact of birth of a nation lies a complicated set of influences. The sense of deprivation of a minority that had successfully ruled India for centuries and was then thrown out of power, followed by prolonged suffering at the hands of our British colonial masters. The concept of democracy came to India from Britain. As any underdog in a colony would do, the depressed Muslim community tried to associate themselves with every reactionary system available at the time. Allama Mashriqi met Hitler, Iqbal met Mussolini and expressed his fondness for him. The simple fact that our imperial masters were advocates of democracy shouldn’t mean that democracy is a bad system. But before we could overcome this fascist tendency we had already won freedom. The premature death of the founder of the nation meant that we were left completely clueless in search of our identity.

And since then, we have stayed obsessed with the same names and intellectuals of that time, without making room for new national poets or national intellectuals. This exercise has cost us an arm and a leg. For one, we have totally failed in our bid at national renewal. That is causing the gradual withering of whatever passed as the national identity. Also, our pursuit of old-fashioned, almost outdated, undemocratic models and ideas have ensured that we remain reactionary and highly paranoid at best. And it is not fair that while the entire developed world and some happy parts of the developing, too, enjoy the fruits of democracy, we stay tethered to an outmoded streak of fascism.

This is high time to develop a consensus for democracy. I say it because I feel that there are still parts of this country where democracy is actively abhorred. And only by closing the dictatorial chapter can we accomplish this.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 29^th, 2013.

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