Pakistan: A Country That It Never Was!
By Mohammad A Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“They conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear”. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Part-I
Reading Bloomberg Business-week of January 23,2011, I wishfully searched for Pakistan’s name in the list of the world’s five nations that produce the stuff that Pakistan is famous for producing, namely children. According to the magazine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Venezuela and Malaysia would be producing the greatest number of working-age population between the years 2010-2050. The wish was not all that un-reasonable as Pakistan does have a respectable number of willing and highly motivated working-age group population - according to one estimate about 43%. Pakistan’s name was not there in the list of these nations.
I looked for Pakistan’s name in the list of the next five countries that would be doing the same. This list included the names of countries like, India, Columbia, Argentina, Turkey and Ireland. Again Pakistan was not there, either. The lists have been prepared by HSBC, the London-based bank. Why Pakistan’s name is not emerging anywhere in positive terms, not even where according to this scribe, it should be - say in as simple a matter as the production of “the working-age population” is what is going to be the theme of this submission.
WHAT IS HOLDING BACK PAKISTAN?: In the fifties, we as students walked on foot to our school about 2 miles away, hitting rocks and dreaming of playing cricket on Sunday; in summer, we slept outside our homes at night in the public area without any fear, because electric fans then were a luxury; we lived on simple diet and drank pure home-well water cooled in earthen pitchers. Once a year watched an Indian movie under supervision, subject to our performance in the annual tests. Teachers, poor but honest in work, would beat us like you wouldn’t beat a dog and yet we respected them from heart. We found our parents poor but hard-working and honest to a fault. That was Pakistan - simple, trustworthy and up-coming.
The only “bad” family in our mohallah was that of a police sub-inspector. His wife was a good-mannered, kind-hearted and a very social lady, but the family was disliked because nobody approved of the way the head of the family earned his living. People were very clear then about what is “Haraam” and “Hilal”. Life by all means was hard, but it was neither bitter nor meaningless. It was valued and cared for as a gift of God.
People genuinely respected each other, and were more or less content. The elders of the mohallah were feared most by the youngsters like us because they were accepted by all as the honorary and self-appointed custodians of values. They honestly administered “justice” on the spot whenever they found us messing up with anything. On Sundays, if we got late due to our craze for playing cricket, we interestingly resorted to all sorts of superstitious tactics - like knotting our “Pajama strings; placing one stone on another after spitting it on”, or on seeking shelter in our mothers’ un-mitigating love. The family invariably ate together. Milk, water, medicine and air, used to be unadulterated. Corruption was there, but it was hated and disliked, and even the eatable stuff coming from the household of the corrupt was sparingly served to us, much to our chagrin, lest it should inject corruption in us. This was the Pakistan in which we were raised by the people who slept and woke up in poverty, but who never let corruption become a part of their household income.
Once the Noble Prophet was asked, “Can a Muslim be a coward?” He replied, “Yes”. “Can a Muslim be a miser?” The Prophet replied, “ Yes, it is possible”. “Can a Muslim be a liar?” The Apostle of God emphatically replied, “No”. Lying and double-dealing just contradict the very ‘deen’ or Faith of a Muslim. The hardest job in Islam is and has been when people have to move religion from their throats to their muscles.
It is not Israel, America or India that is holding back Pakistan from moving forward. It is the mindset of people and the people themselves who have chosen to stay so. Leadership is a reflection of what the people are. God gives to people what they ask for.
In the sixteenth century Italy, a proper gentleman was one who did not wash his hands after relieving himself because he feared that the act of washing hands would remind “decent people” of the “business” he had just finished. In Pakistan nobody wants to “wash his dirty hands” of the filth of corruption because he does not want to lose the veneer of the outer layer of gentlemanliness. People gladly began hating the sinners and loving the sin. “Self-analysis and self-criticism” is the hardest part. The Prophet declared it “harder than over-powering the strongest wrestler”. And the same is true of the character of our very honorable leaders - fake degrees, head-deep in corruption, known liars, power hungry, selfish, self-righteous and yet holding the claim to be every-inch gentlemanly, never abandoning the urge to lead, never accepting that fatal mistakes have been made.
Leadership in Pakistan can be likened to Maulana Rumi’s woman who openly jilted her simple husband and made love to her lover in his presence and yet pretended to be loyal and honest. One day she took her simple husband to a pear tree and climbed it up. On reaching the highest end, she began wailing and crying profusely. The husband, familiar with her tricks, said, “Now what is all this? Why this crying?” “I see somebody with you from here that I cannot put up with it”, she said. The husband who stood there all alone, in order to prove her wrong, climbed up the tree himself. Meanwhile, the woman’s lover came as planned and they both began smooching each other as usual. The man cried from the tree, “You whore; now you are indulging in lewd acts so openly”. The woman maintained her cool and said, “Now you are going to say that you are seeing me with a man though there is no man here with me. It is the illusion of the pear tree”. The people in Pakistan are like the simple man in the story, jilted and kept constantly in a world of illusions, and the corrupt leaders like the shrewd woman.
When these leaders are caught red-handed, or rather with hands still in the cookie-jar, they take the kind of plea that once in 1986 was taken by a defendant in Illinois in a murder trial. He attacked his attorney in the court, and then punched the judge. When convicted of murder, he appealed on the grounds that the judge was not fair because the attack had prejudiced him - the judge - against him. The ruling leadership is in open defiance of the country’s Supreme Court verdicts, and is heard taking the kind of plea as enumerated above. (Continued next week)
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