How nations are built

Opportunity to elect and sack governments through elections will empower people with a sense of ownership.

Winters are finally upon us. Sad long nights in the quiet of the federal capital offer repeated opportunities for reflection. And reflect we must for every single day of the year is now an anniversary of sorts. You cannot single out a day in the entire year when a citizen during the 12-year war was not shot or killed by the terrorists, the insurgents, a natural calamity or of hunger and want.

They say Rome was not burnt in a day. Sixty-six years of misgovernance, lack of imagination and patience and total absence of unity cannot be wished away overnight. We need time for introspection and then follow-up. Do we have it? Who cares! The fact is that, over the course of decades, we have tricked ourselves into believing that we do not have time. This inconsistent and deeply flawed perception of temporal constraints has imbued us with excruciating impatience. And, as a result, time and time again we end up sabotaging the very process of evolution that could have finally built a great nation where we sit today. Travelling extensively within our country, I have come across some distinct features. First, that despite variation of language, faith and colours, we are the same people. We lack the ‘definition’ of a collective dream. I say ‘definition’ because the driver of everyone’s everyday toil is primarily economic and this desire for upward mobility only needs a language of promising opportunities. In the absence of a collective dream, misgivings have crept in.



And this is an age of collective dream. There is an American dream, a European dream, and an African dream. What we need is a Pakistani dream, where we can promise our people of a national renewal, of opportunities, equality, growth and freedoms. Our state, unfortunately, has done a poor job on this. Only a few years after independence, it got obsessed with structuring a society based on an ideology that is hard to put to practical use. The fact that we parted ways with India more than half a century ago was not enough and even now we have to be repeatedly reminded why Partition was inevitable. Do I care as a citizen? Frankly, no. Pakistan is a reality today distinct from India, and we have to make it better.

Then comes the issue of institution-building. A country ruled by dictators for half of its life can rarely even begin to imagine institutions that are inclusive. Since we finally are a democracy, one believes that repeated opportunity to not only elect but also to sack governments through elections will empower people with a sense of ownership and over a period of time, they will build accountable institutions. But it breaks my heart to see the deep state still trying to undermine the very concept of democracy through some opportunist politicians, intellectuals, journalists and other opinion-makers. Sirs, it is your country too and this is not how nations are built.

Then there is the matter of the state being cognisant of its constituents’ needs. That is possible only when the state knows the exact number of its citizens and the population size is kept manageable. Not only did we miss many opportunities to count the population through census, but we also woefully underperformed in convincing people to restrict procreation to a certain level. Unfortunately, thanks to the ignorance of the clergy, from polio vaccination to population control, religious misinterpretations are creating impediments. Our TV channels, too, introduce loudmouthed and half-civilised showmen as religious scholars and allow them to manipulate our audiences. From gender equality to communal harmony, from education to matters of choice, these Platos poison every discussion. It is not a debate of sacred versus mundane. It is a struggle between sanity versus ignorance and paranoia.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 2^nd, 2013.

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