Pakistan
and Politics
By Mohammad Ashraf
Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
What I had vainly attempted to write on in pages,
and failed; I readily found so tersely and lucidly
expressed in a maxim of Thomas Paine. Times change,
but turmoils stay. His saying is:
“It’s a maximum of State that Power
and Liberty are like heat and moisture. Where
they are well mixed, everything prospers; where
they are single, they are destructive”.
Was it by design or by Nature’s decree that
they never got, ‘well mixed’ in Pakistan?
LAL MASJID AND THE LOVE FOR POWER
The maxim is: “While the building is in
flames, they tremble at the expense of water to
quench it”. Human wisdom tells us that the
spill of water in the quench of fire is not a
collateral damage; it is a part that complements
the action.
PEOPLE AND THE KING
The maxim is: “A people may let a king fall,
yet still remain a people; but if a king let his
people slip from him, he is no longer a king”.
Wrong! It happens the other way round in Pakistan.
The king never ceases to be a king because he
never claims to have carried them with him. It
is the people who really fall, because with each
fall they lose a little bit of ‘peopleness’
too. The kings, on the contrary, through each
fall gain new regalities.
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