Same as it ever was

It’s doubtful a formal study has ever been conducted on the matter, but I’m positive Pakistani writers trot out more banal clichés in December than in any other month. There is the obligatory year end column that looks ruefully at wasted opportunities and ineffectually pleads for the heavens above to show greater mercy next time. Then we have a treasure trove of anniversaries that requires us to put on our most mournful faces. From Jinnah’s birth to the creation of Bangladesh and Benazir’s assassination, we have our phraseology for each occasion down pat.

Just try picking up a newspaper on December 25 without encountering the same Jinnah quote at least half a dozen times. You know which one I mean. That line about minorities and respecting their rights, always accompanied by a dirge about how steep our descent has been since those lofty days. Apart from the intellectual laziness — we could occasionally reference the Munir Report which was far more humorous in defending the rights of the persecuted — by pointing to a brighter yesterday, we mythologise our past. In doing so, we forget that the unravelling of Pakistan was a gradual process and that its historical roots stretch back to the founding of the country.

Take the favourite Jinnah quote. As the founding principle of the new state, “you may belong to any religion, caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State”, it had little effect on its recipients, the Constituent Assembly. Less than two years later, that same audience ratified the Objectives Resolution which, by stating that religion would be central to the constitution, provides the intellectual underpinnings of every retrograde statute in our law books.

The Objectives Resolution, if anything, was a more logical step for the nascent state to take than the vision outlined by Jinnah. A politician’s good intentions — and Jinnah, contrary to mythology, was a politician, not a divinely-inspired saint — are always unlikely to trump the structural problems inherent in the state. It is not surprising that a country that has its creation rooted in religion grappled with balancing the desires of its newly-empowered majority with individual liberty. Equally predictably, the majority was the victor in this barely-contested battle.

While in matters religious the majority has always won out, that has not been the case in ethnic disputes. We are belatedly coming to grips with the genocide that was perpetrated on the Bengali population but still haven’t accepted that the violence was an end-point that encompassed a) the language riots of the 1950s, b) Jinnah’s announcement that Urdu would be the lingua franca of the state and c) a host of other measures and grievances, both large and small, that served as warnings of the dangers of shabbily treating East Pakistan. When we wonder how Punjab came to dominate the federation, it is our collective amnesia of how power was structured in the state that allows us to claim ignorance.

Yes, 2010 was a terrible year for Pakistan but it was not an anomaly. The year that passed just showed how hard it can be to blow against the winds of history. Anyone who is shocked at how religion is used for political demagoguery, how Fata is so unlawful and how our elected representatives are so venal needs to expend less effort on working up moral outrage and use the spare time to study our history. After a period of grim resignation, we may finally realise that the quick-fix solutions we propose are like feeding aspirin to a cancer patient.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 30^th, 2010.