‘A Visit to Pakistan: Sunshine and Rain at Once” - 2
By Mohammad A Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire.” - John Witherspoon
Epidemics and earthquakes do not do that much long lasting damage to nations as does the manipulated and well-engineered combination of power and corruption in few people. This combination serves as a perfect recipe for inequality.
There is a method and design in the birth of this inhuman inequality in the developing countries, and Pakistan offers a glaring example of it. The cunning and well-connected people, and especially the politicians, first grab power, then they accumulate and accommodate wealth through taxation, expropriation, enslavement of government agencies. Then, they monopolize all the lucrative economic sectors (banks, insurance companies, industries, communications etc.) largely for their own benefit and for the benefit of their relatives and cronies. Power then serves as a kind of latch-pin to the fly-wheel of generating wealth for these few.
Nothing on earth, as says Walter Scheidel, in his alarming book, “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century.”, nothing then can offset this entrenched mode of inequality. The only thing that has reduced this kind of inequality, according to Scheidel, “has been (and is) some sort of violent shock that can appear in one of these four shapes- a major conflict such as World War II; or a bloody revolution as were the French /Russian/Chinese Revolutions; or a state collapse as in most African countries, or a Pandemic/epidemic- a black-death, famine, etc. Should Pakistan wait for one of these four Great Levelers to take place before it wakes up?
Alas, human history and religion both present ample examples of such alarming bells. It is foolish and naïve in the perception of this scribe that the solution will or can come from the present lot of politicians of Pakistan. They are the cardinal cause to the economic woes of Pakistan. How can they be a part of the solution?
THE PITFALL: “You have to feel the oven’s fire”, if you want to know how hot it is, says Rumi. What should a donkey know who its rider is: Christ or Bricks. His main concern is with the barleys or with braying. Our leaders-the Pakistan born- love to ride the Pegasus of power solely for one purpose-make money by selling dreams and telling lies. What should Nawaz Sharif, Zardari, or Imran know is what poverty is, and how devastating it is to live in a perennial state of deprivation. Drenched in negativity thinking, how can they, the politicians, conceive anything good and wholesome. One reason that democracy invariably fails in Pakistan is that its leaders just stop seeing any good in their opponents, and secondly when they start acting as dictators in the guise of democracy. Pakistan that we left behind some 33 years ago, was never so much polarized and divided, socially, economically, morally, and religiously, and worst of all politically. People are like walking statues with labels pasted on their foreheads. You cannot have any intellectual, academic, unbiased, objective and meaningful discussion with anybody in Pakistan. They all speak like zombies- regimented, colored, biased and highly opinionated. In three sentences you can ascertain as to who is their hero. This scribe did not see any dawn of positive change that may indicate that good morals and manners are taking a shape. I saw a culture in which, as Shakespeare would say, “One may smile and smile, and yet be a villain.”
Leaders often are characterized as of two types: either they are like a ladder, or like a funnel. A leader like a ladder is a symbol of constant upward movement from the lowest level to the highest; a hallmark of positive growth and progress. Such leaders take their people to the top of the roof. The funnel type leaders are the kind once Romans had, and now we have in abundance. Whatever you pour or put in the wide opened mouth of the funnel- wealth, power, influence, fame etc.-it invariably slips into their belly. They are never happy with whatever they have acquired, legally or illegally.
Once Julius Caesar when he was a serving as a junior magistrate in Spain, stood lamenting before a statue of Alexander the Great, because he had achieved so little at an age by which Alexander had already conquered the world. This precisely supplies the reason why Mian Nawaz Sharif is found lamenting and whining so loud, “Why did they kick me out?” Leaders in Pakistan just do not know how to fade away.
One smear of filth, and one drop of poison, is enough to contaminate the whole water tank. Imran Khan may be the hope of hero-shippers, or of fortune hunters, but the people who have surrounded, and the vagaries and whims that he so generously displays, and he kind of bloated ego, which is the eternal enemy to success, it is not very hard to predict as to which category of leaderships he belongs to. He is not the ladder type leader, rising step by step, learning through mistakes, maturing into stability, poise, decency and decorum. Deriding and demeaning others, and lying with closed eyes can deliver some dividends, but good leaders have foresight, character, and integrity, and vision and clarity of purpose.
THE CRAB MENTALITY: They say, crabs are halal being sea-food, but their mentality is terribly harmful. Crab-mongers do not care to put a lid on the bucket in which they put them. Why? They know their mentality which is, “If I can’t have it, neither can you.” Crabs can easily escape from the pot, but instead, they grab each other in a useless “king of the hill” competition which prevents everyone from escaping, resulting in their collective demise. This analogy beautifully depicts human behavior, especially of politicians in Pakistan. They all try to pull down each other, even in matters in which some little achievement had been made. And they do so out of envy, conspiracy or lust for power or for sheer “Me” only. Most often, what keeps our politicians down, and Pakistan at stand-still is nothing else, but they themselves. How can Pakistan achieve anything tangible in the socio-economic situations when the visionless leaders keep riding upon the coat-tails of each other, nullifying whatever little success Pakistan may struggle to achieve?
Our leaders are like those carnivorous plants that eat insects and very small animals by entrapping their prey, and by using a variety of ingenious, effective but simple ways. These plants have a long, vertical, funnel shaped opening at the top. On the front tip lip of the flower is a landing pad covered with sweet nectar that attracts these poor insects (the public). The imbecile insect lands on the lip of the flower and begins to taste the sweet nectar which slowly keeps getting more abundant and sweeter the further inside the plant’s mouth the insect goes. While the insect’s attention is totally consumed by the increasingly sweet taste of the nectar, the slope of the wall becomes steeper and steeper the further the insect goes. The story does not end here. The wall keeps becoming more and more slippery and precarious with downward pointing hairs. Soon the insect gets to a point of no return. It loses its footing and falls into the sticky digestive juices at the bottom from which it cannot escape. This explains the condition of the public, and the nature of politicians in Pakistan. The whole nation is in the grip of two topics: religion and politics. I did not meet anyone talking about other relational matters of life. Compassion and truth: both have become virtues of the past.
Now we all know why politics is a game of entrapment, and how the people in this game begin to feel and act so helplessly like the poor insects. Infatuated by apparent sweetness of empty promises, they just forget the realities, the relevant things, like the slope of the wall getting steeper and precarious due to pointing downward hairs. Instant gratification and charm of the nectar of politics and profit makes any kind of change or reform impossible. In Pakistan, I saw this insect like infatuation and attachment to power and pelf, and the ensuing helplessness of the leaders and individuals to get out of it. The return appears just impossible. Politicians love money, money comes though power, and both when combined bring voters. So there is an epidemic of corruption in which almost all are entrapped. Let us hope that free-willed humans stop getting distracted, or at least slow down in their sliding journey of eating the sweet nectar of corruption.
We leave it for the reader to figure out what the pit is. What is it that distracts us? What is that slippery slope? And what is the trap and how do we avoid it? Politics is that carnivorous plant full of entrapping nectar. I saw all this and much more in my erstwhile country –a county to which I-as a five-year child- have had the privilege to walk on foot with stars in my eyes.
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