Time for a change

The irony of our times, with identities swirling in orbits trying to relate to the instance — a trauma so convincing in itself, it impedes introspection — is to look at what might have shaped the present. Instead of asking ‘why’, the questions are more about ‘how’.

And in the process, the words of His-Story are writing us rather than we writing them to tell Our-Story. The fictional power to shape histories, real and imaginary, has been the subject of much debate in Pakistan. But the ‘truth’ now is immediate, workable and temporary without a past or future and yet repetitive. And even better, we euphemistically refer to it as ‘change’ these days. In our love for euphemisms, history is the change.

The mind seems to boggle for explanations when political stalwarts are cleansed of their pasts by joining newer political parties. As though corruption, moral or financial, is a manifesto from which one is liberated after switching alliances. Why else would politicians be purged of their pasts and considered to be messiahs of subverted narratives that promise not only to change the ‘fate of the nation’, but also appear to be changed individuals. The most recent to join the cavalcade of change has been Chaudhry Sarwar, former governor of Punjab, after he semi-dramatically left his position, realising that he could no longer be an agent of the status quo.

And since change is in the air for long, it’s part of the controversy that surrounds the Pakistan-China Economic Corridor’s ‘changed’ routes. While senators from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan protested against what they consider to be a game-changer for the economy of the marginalised provinces, the minister, Ahsan Iqbal, first tried to convince them that the route was the same and then later termed them part of a larger conspiracy when they refused to believe him. While the Awami National Party substituted the Kalabagh Dam for the Economic Corridor in the Upper House, the elected representatives remained absent from the National Assembly. The changed pattern to settle disputes are all-party conferences and political jirgas and so it is expected that things might be settled in the light of a larger national interest in one of those serious conferences, depending on who believes who.

And while all this change was not enough, the Sindh government for a change took 32 activists of civil society into custody instead. Someone from the ruling party even tweeted that there were a total of 60 banned outfits, then why is the civil society only protesting against one! An appeal for real change, presumably, as banned outfits operate under changed names.

The catchphrase of the new Utopia is somewhere between the ‘please, no worse than this’ and ‘yes, I want change’. The more things change, the more they remain the same. It’s just that every now and then, something out of the blue is shocking enough to wake us up from our reverie. In other words, it’s either the intermittent violence forcing us to change our ways or mundane political disclosures. Change is not just lexical morphology but action that is visible. While euphemisms might lessen the severity, the long-term implications are that it will altogether require a newer approach to things.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2015.

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