Righting our wrongs

Babar Sattar asked this week in Dawn, “Is the ship sinking?” Not yet; but we are just about there. Some compartments are flooded while some may only be partially lost. Is it a sick ship, though? And that may be a more relevant inquiry. Going by what has occurred in the past few weeks, the disease seems pervasive. Is it curable? Perhaps; but that will need a monstrous effort on the part of everyone to right the wrongs that have not only found residence in our being, but are debilitating in every sense of the way.

Apart from the parables, some more innocents have died in Thar; and we have let them wither. That is criminal. Bilawal, still young, felt the pain and wished to do something about it but the status quo came in his way. Trash the news about the leaked report on Thar being incomplete, and take it instead as far too challenging for a governance system that is not used to being called out. The PPP remains a party in transition; the shorter the transition, better will it be for the Party and for Pakistan. The key is to persevere, and call where needed, regardless of the discomfiture it might bring to the veterans. This bridge will need to be crossed, today, tomorrow or the day after. The earlier the better. Stay the course, Bilawal; and persevere. Both the PPP and Pakistan must change.



On a typical day, a couple was burnt alive in a kiln stove; a mother threw away her only child from a first floor residence to avoid being burned by an engulfing fire (both the mother and the child survived); a speeding car in the capital crushed four bystanders — an event that shut the capital down for five hours on the only surviving artery between the twin cities, which choked and jammed in the ensuing mayhem. There wasn’t a soul to stream the commuters to routes that were still available by default, till those too choked. There wasn’t any government around; there hasn’t been one around for a long time. And if you wish to know the pain, try getting out on one such day with a sick dear one.

Just by the way of cumulative abuse and ill wish that is hurled on such occasions, I fear for the success and safety of the grand Metro project that has the length and breadth dug up of what once used to be a serene and still orderly capital. Gigantic metropolitans, a world apart from the capital, are now ungovernable by their sheer size. People talk of the lack of drinking water in rural Pakistan; try swishing at what goes for water in these humungous towns of Pakistan. A mix of water and sewerage is what goes for drinking water everywhere. Town planning has not touched us by a distance. Each new settlement is disconnected to any overarching plan of waste disposal; in fact, none exists. Not even in the capital where they deposit their filth and trash in an open ground now being gradually enclosed with expanding habitation. Our answer: periodic ploughing. Ayaz Amir’s plastic bags still refuse to die and protrude unabashedly.

And no, it doesn’t touch anybody, and none is concerned. That is the bigger problem. As I chatted with a lawmaker the evening of the jammed capital, he wasn’t even aware of anything unusual. In Pakistan, you can safely block out the detestable and the distasteful and coexist in your own sweet world of contrived comfort. Having someone from a humble background like Joko Widodo — the Indonesian president — in Pakistan, is a pipedream. Those who proclaim to turn around the day for the poor and the impoverished spew another kind of garbage, which, too, has found no disposal, yet. If indeed Pakistan must float, this will have to change. We need natural empathy, not contrived empathy.

Pakistani society stands at its weakest point in history. Below this, it must simply implode. And it is not entirely its fault. The locus of power, the politicians, the military and the clergy, essentially determine societal attitudes, as well as the society’s level of antipathy. What these leaders of men betray, this nation exemplifies. If we seem aggressive and undisciplined, that is what this nation has internalised as a trend that delivers. If we hold certain impassivity to corruption, that is what is now the norm among the elite. If we don’t observe the law, it is because the powerful don’t observe the law. We remain shorn of a sense of responsibility, bordering on a dead collective conscience, and immune to any sense of a collective social outrage. We are not only impassive, we are civilisationally dead. Our moral manhood left us a long time back.

Our politics cannot live in the 1990s. Sadly, despite the dharnas and the bit of a contrived challenge they have posed to conventional politics, little may have been learnt within the political establishment. And lest we get too excited, I count Imran Khan and all his cohort representatives of the same genre. The politics of patronage must graduate to policy and governance. Policy is universal; not targeted, unless universally targeted. Governance is the attitudinal change that must encompass accountability, rule of law, administrative efficiency and order.

The army must remain focused on what it does best — provide security; essentially external, and internal, when asked. Beyond that, it must politely refuse to become a factor in political game-playing. It must also dispense its traditional proclivity to oversee policy and political direction. It must enable the politicians their freedom to think and pursue policy delineation independently. The days of certifying patriotic credentials of anyone are long past. It is important for the military to know that it doesn’t know everything, especially on policy and governance; such resident belief is injurious and harmful to our national cause.

The clergy having gained recent eminence must use its power and influence to forge tolerance and inclusiveness in society. Religion must be seen as a positive force, not a divisive trend. Scholars of repute from diverse strains need to enunciate a common minimum agenda on religion and religious thought, along with a code of strictly applied discipline among its followers to ensure its negative impact is neutralised and does not pose to society its biggest vulnerability. Inclusion, tolerance and cohesion must be the new mantra among the social religious thinkers to keep Pakistan afloat.

And then, just maybe, we will keep going.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 15^th, 2014.

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