Bitter home truths

We have descended to an era when politicos, bureaucracy, media, judiciary, military, citizen, live in fear of reprisal

Emile Coue de la Chataigneraie (1857 –1926), a French psychologist and pharmacist, introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on an optimistic application of a mantra-like conscious autosuggestion. One should look at oneself each day and repeat, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Well, if the Islamic Republic of Pakistan were to look at itself on a daily basis it could not have ever been in conformity with the ‘Coue method’. Its auto suggestion would firmly have been and is, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting worse and worse.”

So it has been from the very beginnings when the ‘people’ took the back seat leaving the front to the feudal landed so-called ‘gentry’, the military and the bureaucracy — and their increasingly sustained surrender to the religious right. Moving on, past the break-up of the country, to the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto years and to 1977 when he paved the way for Ziaul Haq, from whose evil and wicked, perverted ways, this unfortunate land still suffers.

Not one of ZuH’s successors in power has had the moral guts to stem the evil. The PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N ruinously meandered their alternate ways through the 1990s, the latter even upping the ante with its chief’s ‘amirul momineen’ try. And here we are in the next century, with the same duo perpetuating their less than mediocre political ways.

In between, we have had Pervez Musharraf, referred to as ‘dictator’. Well, he was far from being an outright military dictator as he, too, blundered his way along nine years of the country’s life. His surrender to the religious right came early when his dogs swiftly disappeared from the national scene. Then followed the back track on the amendment the iniquitously misused blasphemy laws. His greatest sin was not to do what he could have done — his excuse, that he never held full power, again surrendered to the politicians and the religious right.

Dr Stephen Cohen summed him up well in a 2012 interview after the publication of his book, The Future of Pakistan (highly pessimistic): One ‘truth’ he has it was “that General Pervez Musharraf fooled himself and he fooled everyone else. He lacked toughness, he tried to please everyone. He was not capable of leading Pakistan’s liberal transformation, although he personally held a liberal vision of the future”. All his constitutional amendment did was to entrench him and his politician and religious right companions.

The Asif Ali Zardari spell — the less said about it the better. His Eighteenth Amendment fell far short of any reversal of the 1973 original Constitution — it left the document littered with the anti-progressive, mind-shuttering and thus pro-terrorism junk of ZuH’s crippling Eighth Amendment. Apart from that, his numbing laws remain.

And today, with the ridiculous third coming of a man who has been a political supremo since the early 1980s — well past his sell-by date — where are we? In the midst of paralytic governance, education down the drain, land reforms a distant dream after 67 years of life, a mass of negativity and worse — the corruption of a major religious faith, internationally famously acclaimed as ‘the epicentre of terrorism’, the latest example being the Wagah border attack and the murder of 57 and countless injured, some of whom may since have died. What do the false ‘leaders’ do — they ‘condemn’, order an ‘enquiry’, and put it behind them.

Cohen again: “the negative aspects of globalisation have hit Pakistan hard. Pakistan, which was once held up as the most moderate of Islamic states, seems to be embracing extremists and their dysfunctional violent ideas.”

We have descended to an era when — thanks to our varied leaderships — politicos, bureaucracy, media, judiciary higher and lower, even the military, and the ordinary citizen, live in fear of deadly reprisals or mob murder.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2014.

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