An Abraham Lincoln in Pakistan - 3
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
In retrospect, I and most people like me who lived in Pakistan in the early fifties, and who rode to Pakistan in an ox-driven cart in 1947; and who camped on the way in the middle of rotting corpses, and who are now in their late sixties, 3% of the existing population, would endorse that we were poor by every definition of the word, but perhaps not so much and certainly not to the extent that Lincoln was. We always had bread on our platters, and shelter over our heads. Not so in case of Lincoln. He and his sister lived in the midst of thick Indiana forests for fourteen years, in a sort of cabin we call these days as a kind of shed, “which had no floor, no door, no windows, nothing but three sides and a roof of poles and brush. The fourth side remained entirely open to wind and snow and sleet and cold”, writes Dale Cornegie.
Imagine such a living in Nathiagali or in a valley in Azad Kashmir or Hunza in winter. Lincoln’s mother and two children slept there in winter “like dogs, curled up on a heap of leaves and bearskins dumped on the dirt floor in a corner of the shed”, says Dale Carnegie; as for food, “they had no butter, no milk, no eggs, no fruit, no vegetables, not even potatoes. They lived chiefly on wild game and nuts… bears sauntered around them so hungrily that the hogs raised by Lincoln’s father would often get eaten by them while alive. For light, they burned hog-fat that smelled so bad that even Tom, his care-free father would feel constrained to characterize it as smelly. For months they didn’t wash for they knew not what we call as soap. For years, there in Indiana, “Abraham Lincoln endured more terrible poverty than did thousands of the slaves whom he would one day liberate”. Lincoln didn’t possess anything that he had to worry about some “Swiss accounts”. America’s strength and riches owe their strength to the poverty and honesty of leaders like Abraham Lincoln.
On getting elected as President, and that too by chance, he traveled seventy miles to Charleston to say farewell to his stepmother. She clung to him and said between her sobs: “I didn’t want you to run for President, Abe, and I didn’t want to see you elected. My heart tells me that something will happen to you, and that I will never see you again till we meet in heaven”. And she was right.
Talking to his law-partner of sixteen years and his junior, Mr. Herndon, before leaving for Washington, he visited his old office and prophetically made a strange request about the sign-board that hung on the door, “Let it hang there undisturbed… give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened”. Lincoln was so short of cash then that he had to borrow money from his friends to pay for his trip to Washington”, writes Dale Carnegie on page 120. That was Lincoln, the Un-known. Nations prosper and blossom if their leaders make integrity and honesty as the main part of their character.
The leaders of Pakistan in comparison take pride in being the sons and daughters of landlords and waderas. One leader from Karachi’s poor area, Liyari takes pride in stating that his forefathers owned a car in Karachi when none else; another plumes himself by boasting that he owns 200 kinds of well-bred dogs; a yet another envisions for himself a role that should empower him to govern Pakistan through a remote control from the capital of a western country; another very popular leader ( who never gets tired of mentioning his two stints as the PM of Pakistan, and who is dying to be in that role for the third time), mentioning all the time how wrongfully he had been removed by a military dictator, how direly he was humbled, and then concluding that all the problems of Pakistan would get solved once the same abject humiliation was meted out to that military dictator; this same leader now sets new standards of high living by introducing a farm- house culture. The president of the country and many of his federal ministers who face quite a few corruption charges reflect a lifestyle before which even regalities of the Moorish kings would pale. And of course the saga of the Swiss accounts.
The fact of the matter is that the character of the leadership in Pakistan is soiled, is faulty; their competence to govern is questionable. And worst of all, they all without exception lack integrity and honesty; their credentials are dubious; their political sagacity doubtful. They lack freshness of ideas as they are completely devoid of offering any creative solutions to the complex problems that basically are because of them, and are beyond their comprehension. They believe that since they are reputed, rich and resourceful, therefore, they are the most qualified people to rule. Pakistan, basically, stands now as a land which these leaders appear to have pre-disposed among themselves by factoring it into difference provinces as per its resources. Pakistan is entering into an era into which America had entered some 160 years ago during the times of Abraham Lincoln.
Pakistan urgently needs a leader like Abraham Lincoln who may have the ability to lead people; who could make people believe in concrete terms that he was one like them; that he was honest; educated and enterprising; who could think creatively; who had a vision as well as a foresight; who could face the hard ground realities and yet like Lincoln could remain without malice; who had the ability to promote in people a sense of unity and who could restore in them their lost faith and trust in leadership; who was a good listener; who was a visionary because he knew where he wanted them to lead.
Article 5 of the Constitution of Pakistan makes it binding on all people of the land to first profess allegiance to the country they live in. If the Sardars of Baluchistan and the wadera of Sind did not learn it earlier; they better learn it now. India inherited more than 650 principalities at the time of partition. No Prince or Raja now talks about his former fiefdom now. The 18th Amendment recently passed had been the result of a pre-bargain that was made to each leader of the political party. Had it been based on sincerity, it would have started delivering some results by now.
Doing away with the concurrence list and placing the resources of the country in the hands of the Baluchi Sardars who stand accused of using them for maintaining private militia; or placing the management of the cantonments in the hands of the provinces, or putting the selection process of the judges of the Supreme Court in the hands of the parliamentarians whose very educational degrees are suspectful, and whose honesty is doubtful, to count only a few, are some of the reasons that the 18th Amendment is bound to further polarize the country than unite it.
Abraham Lincoln waged the bloodiest, the most savage conflict in the history of the world up to the present time to keep the United States of America as United. Once a boy asked him, “If it was okay for us to split away from England, then wasn’t it okay for the South to split away from the North?” He knew the answer. Today leaders in Pakistan want to split the country into different provinces, citing examples from the past history. Pukhtunwa used to be up to Attock; Kalat used to be an independent state as was Bahalwalpur, forgetting that all countries used to be a part of some other land. Once Burma and Pakistan used to a part of India. Once Punjab used to be a part of the East Punjab ruled by the Sikhs. Funny logic. For that matter, California, Texas and Arizona used to a part of Mexico. Leaders that do not use borders as bridges fail.
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with the nations”, these golden words of Lincon on his second inauguration, and which according to Carl Schurz, “No ruler had ever spoken to his people. America had never before had a president who had found such words in the depths of his heart”.
Victory did not make him happy. “The war is killing me”. “The cry of the widow and the orphan was always in Lincoln’s ears”, said his Secretary. Mothers and sweet hearts and wives, weeping and pleading rushed to him daily to obtain pardons for men who had been condemned to be shot. No matter how worn he was, how exhausted. Lincoln always heard their stories, and generally granted their requests for he never could bear to see a woman cry, especially if she had a baby in her arms”. The same Lincoln used to be firm like a rock when he would tell his general Grant to act like a pit-bull, lock his bite and chew and choke the dissidents. He would taunt general Mcclellan for his delaying tactics by sending him a telegraph like this, “I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horse of your army have done since the battle at Antietam that fatigues anything?”
And he was only nominally a military man. He mic-romanaged the civil war that no general of the West Point would have. According to the Time, “Three years and seven generals later, he found the man to match”, and this man was U. S. Grant, another broken and jobless person like him. Grant had been to the West Point but was dismissed later on the charges of being sloppy and alcoholic. But Lincoln trusted him and defended him. He also made bold and strange cabinet choices and appointed his arch enemies and rivals as its members. “Keep your friends close- and your enemies closer”. Did the partnership between Zardari and Nawaz Sharif last more than three months, even when both had passed through the most humiliating circumstances; and even when the country demanded unity of purpose?
As a state legislator, Abraham championed government support in its efforts to build bridges, roads and canals so that people in rural areas could bring the produce to the market easily. In his words this was done “to life artificial weights from all shoulders-to clear the path of laudable pursuits for all-to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life”. But depression of 1830’s turned the tables. Lincoln felt guilty and his opponents accused him of putting the state in trouble. His reputation got damaged and he felt forlorn. It was on this occasion that he spoke these heart-rending words,
“I am now the most miserable man living… if what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me”. He thought of committing suicide at one time. The people of Pakistan have no electricity; no water to drink; no jobs; target killing has become rampant, and the political pundits are parsing over one non-issue or another. Pakistan urgently needs a leader like Abraham Lincoln, who is willing to give the people a healthy and positive direction and who is willing to do it; whatever it takes.
“When I’m gone” Lincoln moaned, “I hope it can be said of me that I plucked a thistle and planted a flower wherever I thought a flower would grow”. And in America flowers grow everywhere. Thank you, President Abraham Lincoln.
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