Mind and mortar

Progress starts from the mind and seeps into mortar. Except, in Pakistan, it does not.

The last elections were fought on the theme of improvement, development and change. Contenders promised a genuine betterment in the lives of people; a real improvement in the quality of their existence. All politicians in all countries make such promises in all election campaigns. Through such promises, they attempt to connect with the inner cravings of the electorate. These cravings are universal, cutting across boundaries, cultures and ethnicities. Cravings spur dreams, which in turn, fuel a desire to materialise them. Any politician, who says he or she will help us make our dreams come true, gets our vote. But promising is easy. So is dreaming. Neither, however, is a plan of action. This is where the problem starts.

Economists can write volumes on the definition of development, but a voter has a simpler scale to measure it: how does it improve my life and that of my family? The Pakistani politician tailors his message accordingly and lists out things he believes the voter wants. The usual to-do list is then regurgitated with nauseating regularity: roads, schools, hospitals, jobs, protection from police and patwari. Once in power, the politician approves billions of rupees for schools, hospitals, roads. Projects are tendered out, hefty amounts are siphoned off, commissions are given and taken, structure are raised. Development ensues. Voila! But anyone who has experienced the development of developed countries knows well there’s more to it than school buildings, hospital structures, bridges, flyovers, underpasses. The path to development — and progress — in these countries germinated first in the mind and then flowered through ideas. This blossoming of thought centred on improving the lives of individual citizens through the process of empowering them. Empowerment is now a staple of civil society jargon and its over-usage has stripped it of its soul. But deep inside it, lies buried a very simple and very powerful concept: the State exists for the citizen, and not the other way round.

Yes, the State is more powerful than a citizen. But this is because the citizen — as per the modern social contract — has surrendered parts of his and her individual sovereignty to the state in lieu of which the state makes decisions to empower the individual. This empowerment takes various forms: capacity-building, character enrichment and income-generating prowess through education; physical well-being through a health system; justice through a steel frame of individual rights and privileges; and an enabling environment for advancement through a culture of merit and equal opportunity.

Sounds bookish? Perhaps, but the fact is that advanced nations have internalised these lessons while travelling across a tortured historical trajectory of political turmoil, social upheavals, ideological genocides, revolutions, wars and butchery of millions of souls. Now it may sound bookish, then it certainly did not. And you know what else is not bookish? A five-year-old girl gets sexually abused in Lahore and the might of the Punjab government, including the entire police and intelligence apparatus, cannot apprehend the culprit. Seven weeks later, the story is all but forgotten, and the chief minister, too, has gone quiet. She is but one of thousands of such cases. Yes, Lahore has dazzling roads and brightly illuminated flyovers; yes, Lahore has a gleaming metro bus service and an efficient rescue service. But in Lahore, the strong can bend the law — and the weak — to their will. In Lahore, the weak can be picked up at random by the cops and beaten to a pulp. In Lahore, justice is not given as a right. It snarls and growls, and often bites those who cannot bite back.

This is Lahore, one of the most developed cities in Pakistan. Here, development can be seen in the shape of bricks and mortars. But it cannot be felt because there is no soul inside the bricks and mortar shell. The rest of the country doesn’t even have this shell. It’s an empty and barren wasteland ravaged by generations of rapacious elite, who operate in a cocoon devoid of ideas, thought, and the glorious weight of history.

We are faced not with the issue of priorities, but with a crisis of the mind.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 27^th, 2013.

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