Changing Pakistan’s Social Trajectory
By Dr Yasser Latif Hamdani
Pakistan’s economy is declining rapidly and little — if anything — is being done to curb this massive slide. Almost everyone has contributed to this in some way or the other. Despite the economy growing at a respectable rate of 5.4 percent, the structural problems are so severe that we have managed to make a complete mess of an economy that has always remained stable despite bad management. The problem with Pakistan’s economic planners is that they cannot think beyond foreign loans and always see economic bailouts as the key. Contrary to the many tall claims on the election campaign trail, the PTI government is in talks with IMF as well as Chinese banks to secure a bailout package for the country. It is easy to claim that you can bring $200 billion back to Pakistan, but it is much harder to actually fulfill such outlandish promises.
Rational self-interest is something we have never considered or have been concerned about. Providence has bestowed upon us a great land with immense natural and human resources that we have always squandered.
Consider the GCC countries. Sure, they have oil and we are painfully aware of that one distinct advantage they have had over other countries like us, but there is something we can learn from them. Within the United Arab Emirates (UAE) we see the Dubai model of development. Dubai, which was nothing more than a desert village a few decades ago, has become a hub of international travel and tourism. Its phoenix like rise seems to have been directly proportional to the decline of the one city that was poised to be better in every way and had a distinct cultural, social and political advantage. That city was Karachi, which was the envy of Asia during the 1970s in terms of growth, openness, good weather and indeed a vibrant nightlife. In terms of history, culture and cosmopolitan culture, Dubai could hardly compete with Karachi in 1977. Karachi and Bombay were the main competitors and Karachi would still win hands down, being relatively new and having been the capital of the new nation. General Zia’s Islamisation as well as his exploitation of ethnic politics in Karachi made it a veritable hell-hole.
The policy makers in Dubai were watching carefully. Islam in UAE is not just a matter of constitutional commitment but is in fact truly in its natural habitat and is part of the cultural identity of the country in a more substantial way than it can ever be to us. Yet their fierce commitment to the faith, and indeed its laws did not mean the totalitarian dystopia of the kind unleashed by the would-be Islamists of Pakistan. Today, if you walk down Shaikh Zayed Road or take a stroll on JBR, you find classical Islam in complete harmony with secular modernity, corporate culture and superb multiculturalism. To be sure, Dubai has a strict Islamic code on the statute books which is implemented also. Even though alcohol is widely available, penalties are severe and can land you in jail under Sharia Law. Yes, there are no floggings for the most part but any disorderly public drunkenness is liable to land you in jail for up to a year. It is a remarkable balancing act between personal freedom and social norms. Therefore, if any person, Muslim or non-Muslim, drinks responsibly and recreationally, there is nothing to fear. The state is concerned not with your personal morality, but with undoing the externalities of alcohol consumption. Similarly, there are no dress codes beyond the simple convention that what you wear should not be outrageous. Having an 80 percent foreign population, with many women wearing clothes considered scanty by religious standards, certainly has not dampened the religious fervor of Arab nationals in the city.
The reason I mention this social liberalism in Islamic Dubai is primarily to make a point that Pakistan has squandered its great advantages in tourism and as a hub of travel which could have easily bolstered our economy by repeatedly bowing down before the religious clergy that uses Islam as a means to exert its own baneful influence on us. The decline of PIA is a case in point. There was a time when PIA was one of the leading airlines in Asia, if not the world. Business class passengers were served the finest champagnes and Pierre Cardin designed the uniforms of our airhostesses. General Zia put an end to all that. The way the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) recently took notice of Eva Zubeck’s Kiki Challenge on a PIA plane shows that we remain trapped in General Zia’s moral straitjacket, and this has cost us our soft image. Still, we remain obsessed with the concept of having a “soft image” but remain unwilling to do anything about it.
Pakistan’s economic, cultural and social well-being lies in allowing personal freedoms and balancing them out with our deep cultural commitment to Islam. Islam should be an ornament of gold indicative of our magnificent and glorious heritage and not some sort of totalitarian chain that some have imagined it to be. This country has a lot to offer the world, including the remarkable confluence between South Asia and Central Asia, between our Hindu and Buddhist pasts and our Islamicate present and future and between our ancient ethos dating back millennia and the modernity that British rule gave us. If Prime Minister Khan’s Naya Pakistan builds on this and makes Pakistan an attractive global destination for tourists and business travelers alike, he will go down in history as a great PM. On the other hand if he doubles down on Zia’s policies and exclusivism, there will be nothing new about his Pakistan. Let us hope that our PM is truly serious about the lost modern — to use Ammara Maqsood’s term — which sometimes even Imran Khan is seen referring to.
(The writer is practicing lawyer and was a visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School in Cambridge MA, USA. Daily Times)
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