Where Is Pakistan’s Linchpin? -2
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA

“A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness… For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” - Nelson Mandela

Why do poor voters always, not sometimes, back parties whose leaders and whose policies mostly serve the elites? This, of course, is a charge which the common people, the king-makers, need to answer, and no justification can be supplied on their behalf. Tariq Thachil tries to find one rationale for this trend in his book, “Elite Parties, Poor Voters”. He points out the new governmental hood-winking tricks of abusing the welfare programs - Benazir Welfare Fund in Pakistan” and “Food aid, and cash benefit programs for the poor in India”, exclusively for boosting the vote bank of their own parties. Voters get sold out so cheap because of economic imperatives. The elections of 2013 in Pakistan and of the local government elections currently being held in Pakistan endorse the charge. Poor people get sold out there too with the price paid by the ingenious politicians with the people’s own money. Now that is really being smart. The lamb keeps on licking the hand of the butcher by remaining totally unmindful of what is about to happen to him. Same is true of the people of Pakistan.

“Why Nations Fail?” Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in their wonderful book with the cited title rightly point out, “Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determine prosperity or poverty? None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Fifteen years of original research conducted by them shows that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea is a homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. It is all due to politics. Nations fail when the linchpins - the institutions that hold it together - either get broken; or they get paralyzed or they just become dysfunctional. Disasters then become inevitable.

The first order of business, we are told, should be about the provision of bread and butter, not bells-and-whistle stunts about Metros, mega-projects, motorways; and silly APC’s sessions that by-pass the burdensome Parliament. No politician likes to know how to live democracy; what they learn to know early on is how to use this tool to get into power. Democracy is all about people, their well-being, and not about staying in power on a perennial basis. Hungry people are more dangerous than angry people, so goes the saying. Attaining the maximum political power is a dangerous trend and craze. Modi will learn soon, and Mian Nawaz Sharif has a knack to never learn from the past. Turkey’s recent elections served the biggest setback to an over-confident Recap Tayyip Erdogan, and his 13-year rule. His AK party failed to secure a majority upsetting his plans to give himself some extra powers. In his effort to get more, he lost even what he had earned by dint of his performance. Our politicians in the saddle want all this without performing. It is a timely lesson to the current rulers of Pakistan. With more powers, leaders in Pakistan have always ceased to grow, and have often led themselves to disasters, and even to gallows. What Mian Nawaz Sharif should have done from day one is going full throttle against terrorism, bringing about a revolution in the field of education, and making it a mission to implement cleanliness in the country. The country is dirty and is thirsty and is now getting angrier, because it is ignorant too. Literacy rate is still the lowest. He wasted a God-given opportunity by focusing, like before, on revenge, on past memories, on consolidating his powers. It was damn easy to please the common people by bringing some small tangible changes in their lives. Slogans do not feed people, nor will please a joy-ride in a Metro. Good, nutritious food, small and clean school, an affordable health-care center or hospital, and fear-free day, is all that a common, poor man yearns for.

General George S. Patton Jr. was America’s most audacious general during the Second World War. The Germans feared him most. As Bill O’Reilly in his book, “Killing Patton,” puts it that this great general died a somewhat mysterious death in a road-side accident, and as a controversial hero. His problem, as General Bradly once his junior, and later his senior, put it was his own mouth. ( How many leaders got destroyed by their own mouths? The exiled leader of MQM is one, and the Captain is the second casualty). He believed in reincarnation, and was convinced “that he was a soldier and a great general in his many past lives. He once stood shoulder to shoulder with Alexander the Great and Napoleon. He crossed the Alps on an elephant while residing in the body of the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal”. Patton also was quite certain that he once fought for the great Caesar as a Roman legionary, marching into battle on this very same road from Wasserbillig to Trier. Even as biting wind chapped his exposed face, Patton could 'smell the coppery sweat and see the low dust clouds', of legionaries advancing on the Germanic hordes along the Moselle.” General Patton could hallucinate because he had performed and had won Sicily; what did the Pakistan leadership give to the people of Pakistan that sometimes they hallucinate as Amir-ul-Momineen”, “The Quaid in various nomenclatures; the Azam’s in different forms; the First-time-in-the-history of Pakistan types? Despair, negative thinking, passivity, docility, an acute sense of deprivation, and a never-ending state of living in fear. These are implicit and tacit kind of curses. They virtually have stolen away from the people their basic right to dream even.

People like us who once lived in poverty but remained upright, proud of the “Nerd values” our parents engendered in us, the kind which the Crag list has - running chores for neighbors, going to school on foot by walking three miles, kicking pebbles on the way, fighting, hugging and laughing, but never stop hallucinating and dreaming like general Patton. We were taught to be like the pipe-wrench, simple, ordinary, but committed and exceedingly useful.

Religion for us used to be a simple matter of Faith in Allah; we never held any division between the body and the soul, and always took their inter-dependence on each other as a God-given blessing. Hence we never thought that religious education was different from the mundane education, with the result that we had a natural aversion to the worldly masters. Our homes were small, simple, with perhaps one electric fan even that too sparingly used in very hot weather, a few items of furniture and one Murphy radio, and forbidden to listen to such old songs as, “Goariay Ganay Diay Porian…” So life was simple and focused; it was drilled into our minds early on that the only road leading to success for us was the one that passed through the corridors of knowledge. That was the only way we were taught that we could beat the world which in the fifties and sixties was as chaotic and corrupt as it is today, with similar kind of leaders, but with only one difference. Then corruption was clearly defined and labeled as evil, and the people who indulged in it stood marked as morally bad, though not socially. My mother in her utter simplicity would not serve us the food that arrived from the house of a good neighbor, an SHO, in spite of our protests, for she would consider it, not evil, but just not good for us. It was this push on healthy lines by the parents that in my matriculation examination I scored a perfect 200/200 in Math in 1958. For me the biggest tipping point was not that general Ayub Khan had taken over the country. It was that I do not have to stand in line after school for collecting our ration of food-grain for hours, or that now we could eat sweets as cheap at cheap rates; and could drink pure milk at almost the same rate. I remember first time people standing in a queue; picking up trash from the road; riding their bikes with lights; butchers selling the meat from behind screened doors, and grocery stores displaying the rate list, and selling things as per the rate displayed; officials appearing in their office on time in a dressed-up form. And we could take out our cots and sleep outside in the open without any fear of any kind.

William Taylor, in his book, “Mavericks at Works”, is 100% correct when he says, “In business, as in baseball, bigger and richer doesn’t always mean better and more successful”. The best way is to outperform others by outthinking them. If you want to win big, you have to change the game. Growth for the sake of growth, business for the sake of business is not enough. Growth should be for a purpose - for the sake of people. Growth for the people begins for a purpose.”A Maverick idea is one which equips us to act; opens our eyes, engages our imagination, encourages us to think big and urges us to aim higher. We consider it a success if it motivates us to act more boldly as a leader and more decisively as a competitor. We will measure our success by how much we contribute to others.

In this culture of borrowing and borrowing more, true success is the first casualty, and lack of comprehensive and meaningful growth is the second. And Pakistan and its leadership lives on borrowed money, on borrowed technology; on borrowed help, and even on borrowed idea. They watch what Turkey is doing; what India is planning. What is good for Pakistan can only be determined by looking at the ground realities that exist here. In Turkey, in the recent elections, openly Gay candidates have been elected; and a good number of women ( from 73 to 93) have also made their way to the Parliament. We in Pakistan have almost eliminated the minorities, and women still remain barred from voting in certain areas. Unless the people get rid of this kind of leadership which promotes hero-ship, and blind following, there are dim changes of any healthy changes in the foreseeable future. Society stands on its inner strength of values; on its scope of tolerance of those who differ from us; and on its ability to discover goodness in others; not on foreign aid, or being self-righteous, and judgmental or on staying narrow-minded in outlook, but claiming to be tolerant.