Hurrah for the status quo

Attempting to zero in on things that are downright right in this Islamic Republic is not an option. Wrongs abound in whichever direction one looks. Human rights are a mess, but then they have never been listed as a priority by any form of government to which we have been subjected.

Law and order, that first listed priority by Founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is now for the birds; the judiciary falters on, the law enforcement agencies are in a dark hole, no one trusts them. The list goes on an on, and with it the lack of trust. Our economy czars are experts when it comes to economy with the truth, their figure-spinning abilities are legendary. Even that great white hope, the CPEC, which we are told will transform this country for the generations to come is chock-a-block full of Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. The provinces are scrapping over it as neither they (apart from the ruling province) nor we understand the full implications of the massive deal. We can all but conjecture as to the truth of the story of the Rs46 billion.

Human life (let alone rights) counts for nothing when it comes to the leadership which is only concerned with preserving its own lucrative upper projection. Rarely does a day go by without one or several targeted shootings of citizens and policemen in Karachi or somewhere up in the wilds of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — and who was at all perturbed about the slaying of 20 labourers in that unfortunate, neglected and deeply troubled province of Balochistan? Down in the port city, and in Punjab, women and men who have tried and succeeded in doing some good for their fellow human beings, who have stood up against violence and bigotry in this violence-prone and bigoted land, have been violently gunned down and all that the symbols of the state can do is to ‘condemn’ and order arrests (of anyone).

So naturally, fear has permeated, everyone is fearful of something or the other. The transient leaders are surrounded with state-provided security, leaving the citizens to fend for themselves. Even our corps commanders, protectors of the nation, move from A to B with massive motorcades, as do the police chiefs. Freedom of expression is a myth, even thought is curbed by bigotry, closed minds and stupidity. The press dare not even print a photograph of a painting by Picasso (just one example) for fear of some insane reprisal.

With the declared rigging of the high-profile constituency of Lahore, we can now be justified in the common belief that all elections are rigged in one way or another — this last one in bungling manner. Now, for long electoral reforms have been debated, and who is to doubt that they are much-needed if this country is to move on to what elsewhere is commonly known as democracy?


Thanks to Mickey Shafi who posted on Facebook last week an old column written by the one time self-confessed ‘slave of Mian Sahib’s thoughts’, Mushahid Hussain, now moved over to the Gujrat Chaudhrys, we have the following gem. After a spell of comfortable incarceration following Mian Sahib’s ouster in 1999, in February 2001 the NYT carried his column “In the Cage, In Search of Grace”, from which one excerpt:

“The flaws in Pakistan’s democratic system are due not only to a failure of leadership, but to attitudes that are, deep down, autocratic and bigoted. Politics is driven by aggregation of power and privilege. Family oligarchies flourish, shutting out merit and closing doors to the middle and lower classes. In a self-defeating live-and-let-die approach, elites try to hang on to power at all costs. There is also a politics of vendetta and revenge as powerful families and factions fight one another in a vicious cycle that smothers the breathing space for forgiveness, dissent and coexistence.”

Now, back in the saddle again, what are the honourable senator’s thoughts?

Published in The Express Tribune, May 9^th, 2015.