May 07 , 2010

Rot at the Top

 

There are two ways to damage and fragment the nation from within. The first is to hand over the reins of decision-making to a criminal elite under the mask of democracy. The second is to fragment the country under the banner of provincial autonomy. The two elements are already in play. Both negate the founding vision and spirit of Pakistan and Islamic values, which shun divisions along ethnic, sectarian, and tribal grounds.

What the Indian National Congress could not do has been done by Pakistan’s pseudo-Parliament. Parrot-like, it has been thoughtlessly hailed. What is there to rejoice? When the need is to build bridges and unite, more barriers are being erected.

A trip to Tito’s Yugoslavia many years ago is a reminder of the gravity of the problem looming ahead. Josip Broz Tito, the President of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Yugoslavia, tamped down ethno-national and sectarian tensions and gave cohesive identity to his country, which helped give it a pride of place in the comity of nations.

During a visit to Sarajevo, the majority Bosnian Muslim population there showed comfort with Tito’s rule in that it had kept Serbian bigotry from flaring up. I happened to stand on the exact spot at Sarajevo where gunshots fired by assassin Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914, killed Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, triggering World War I. Many years later, in Washington, DC, I had breakfast with Bosnia’s first President, Alija Izetbegovic – a devotee of Allama Iqbal – and discussed the repercussions of an independent Muslim state in the European hinterland. Izetbegovic believed that Western civilization would foil any bloody replay. Events proved otherwise.

After Tito, the former Yugoslavia shattered into Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo. It brutally demonstrated that, where there are already break-away tendencies, you don’t encourage them.

The United States of America owes its unified existence to the vision and will of one man: its 16 th President, Abraham Lincoln, who went to war in 1861to prevent the Southern states from seceding. Today, there are 50 states in America, but the American identity is so strong that all across the nation, one sees US flags fluttering from the households of America.

If Iqbal and Jinnah had emphasized ethnicity over the larger Muslim identity, there would have been no Pakistan. If Islam had highlighted Arabism, its appeal would have been restricted to the Arabian peninsula. A country with a fragile national identity can ill-afford pressures which enhance pre-existing fissiparous tensions and divisions.

Paper guarantees in Parliament are worthless when there is rot at the top and alienation on the ground. Meanwhile, the burning issues of governance, which matter to the public, remain as is.

The rot cannot be undone by paper amendments.

Every region in the world has a hub of education, development, and progress. In Western Europe, Germany and Britain predominate. In East Asia, it has been Japan, despite being devastated by two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the United States, it has been the states in the northeast corridor exercising financial and political power. Geographic location is often destiny, which partly explains why some regions are far more advanced than others. It is over-simplification to believe that it results because one exploits the others.

In Pakistan, Punjab is seen as the sheet-anchor. Its shattering, therefore, is pivotal to designing wider divisions. The myopia of the political class will do what it can to fragment the nation. Many are being duped into supporting a sheep-like march to the edge of darkness. What is occurring is a recipe for a slow-motion soft break-up of the country. The foes of Pakistan must be laughing hard.

In Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece, “The Chess Players”, the Muslim nobility is engrossed in chess play and related trivia, completely oblivious to the creeping annexation of their domain by Imperialist-inspired hostile forces.

It reflects Pakistan’s ruling class, which has never failed to fail Pakistan.