Let’s behave like a nation

Real Pakistan disappeared with its tragic dismemberment, whatever was left is pillage ground for self-serving rulers.

The 5^th Youm-e-Shuhada held at garrisons all over the country this year served a special purpose. It was an occasion, as it has been every year since 2010, for the nation to pay homage to the ultimate sacrifices rendered by its martyrs for the cause of their motherland. But more than that, it also served to awaken the nation from its disgusting slumber. It was a timely wake-up call to a people who seem to have become shamelessly insensitive to their own existence.

I attended the ceremony at Yadgar-e-Shuhada in Lahore where thousands of people including the families of Shuhada as well as serving and retired officers of the armed forces, parliamentarians, media and civil society members sat spellbound for more than three hours witnessing the tales of heroism and experiencing the rejuvenation of a new spirit that we as a nation needed so badly. It was, indeed, a solemn occasion not only acknowledging the supreme sacrifices given by our martyrs but also sharing with the families of Shuhada their sense of pride and fortitude. The experience touched every soul and made every eye tearful.

The scene of a Pakistan-bound refugee-packed train in a documentary film took me back subconsciously to the fateful train journey that my family (I was only a small child then) undertook in 1947 while migrating from India to the newly-created state of Pakistan leaving behind millions of others, their hearths and homes, their landed properties and their ancestral history of thousands of years to submerge into a new larger national identity. No sacrifice then was greater than freedom. No wonder, for my family as indeed for millions of others, it was a momentous decision to opt for Pakistan.

Memories of many scary moments and painful experiences from those days are still seared into my mind. I cannot forget the moments when our train, after crossing into Pakistan, steamed into Harbanspura Railway Station with everyone on the train crying with joy and raising spontaneous slogans “Allah-o-Akbar” and “Pakistan Zindabad”. At that crucial juncture in our life, as our three-month long journey ended, tears of joy filled every eye at the end of that fateful journey. Here on the Shuhada Day, while feeling a similar soul-jerking ambience all around, I asked myself what has gone wrong with us as a nation.

Looking into the mirror, we only see a mutilated and disjointed nation. We see a mass of hollow people with wooden faces leaning together as a paralysed body making gestures without motion and reflecting an image of what TS Eliot once described as “shape without form and shade without colour”. We find ourselves a hapless nation, debilitating itself physically as well as spiritually and a country looted and plundered by its own rulers, left with no dignity and independence. We are not even ashamed of what we are doing to ourselves. We have become a begging-bowl country. The world also calls us the ‘most dangerous nation’ on earth. Isn’t it time for us to change and behave like a nation?

Indeed, a nation, like an individual, is an organic entity which goes through different life-stages from birth and infancy to the identity crisis of adolescence, then evolving into a robust maturity and adulthood, and if not nourished and sustained through institutional strength with political, economic, social and moral steadiness, fading into decline and decadence. These stages are partly the result of government policies, priorities and patterns of governance, partly of the way leadership functions or malfunctions, and partly of the changing perceptions and preferences of the people. As a nation and as an independent state, where do we stand today?

With the Quaid-e-Azam’s early demise, Pakistan was orphaned in its very infancy and lost the promise of a healthy youth with acute systemic deficiencies and normative perversities restricting its orderly natural growth. After the Quaid, it was left without any sense of direction and in a state of political bankruptcy and moral aridity. It started cutting itself into pieces, losing within less than quarter of a century not only its own half but also its very rationale that had inspired its founding fathers to struggle for a separate homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent. The real Pakistan disappeared with its tragic dismemberment, and whatever was left is the pillage ground for its self-serving rulers.

We are still not decided on some of the vital questions related to our statehood. Pakistan came into being in the name of Islam and democracy but it has lived without practising both. A country, which was considered a ‘20^th century miracle’ of a state and which was fought and won entirely through democratic and constitutional struggle now itself struggles haplessly for genuine democracy and constitutional primacy. It is unsure of what its own original rationale was and what it stands for today. In the process, it is suffering an ideological ‘schizophrenia’, with a total disconnect between the vision that inspired its creation and its actual phonotypical behaviour.

To make things even worse, in recent years, the so-called liberal elite and our pseudo intellectuals have been wilfully distorting our history, misleading the youth that Pakistan’s birth was only ‘an accident of history’ and that the India-Pakistan border is no more than an artificial ‘thin’ line drawn on paper. They are naïve enough to believe that if we were to erase this ‘thin’ line, there would be no India-Pakistan problems and we would live happily thereafter at peace together as ‘one people’ with no need for any armed forces. They are sadly mistaken and need a tutorial in history to know that Pakistan is not an accident of history.

Those of us familiar with the history of the subcontinent know why having lived together for centuries, Hindus and Muslims remained poles apart in their attitudes to life with a different worldview altogether. This distinctiveness of the two communities was evident in the ‘encounter’ between Hindu and Muslim cultures that began over a thousand years ago. And yet, they remained distinct and far apart. Nobody can deny this reality; otherwise, there would not have been two states carved out of India in 1947.

Pakistan came into being as a result of a long struggle and with unquantifiable sacrifices. It is now a reality with its borders drawn in blood that cannot be erased, not even through any ‘goodwill’ gestures that some of our ruling elite and media friends are eager to make.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2014.

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