Change: Pakistan’s Only Option
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat it.” - Lillian Hellman (1906-84), an American author
Floods came; earthquakes came ; droughts came ; three wars with India came; four military takeovers came: even seven prime ministers and one commander-in-chief during a period of eight years (1950-58) came: they all combined did not do so much damage to Pakistan as has been done just by three politicians in the past thirty years. Their names are too obvious to warrant any clear articulation.
The 180 million people of Pakistan virtually deserve a whipping because their inability to react and change is not just un-understandable, it is annoying too. What more humiliation do they need to taste in order to wake up from this mystical state of passive sufferings. How long they need to see the starving of their children; their killing in the streets; their dying of mal-nutrition; of water-borne diseases; of pollution; and of utter helplessness while their insensitive, cruel, arrogant, incompetent and corrupt to the hilt politicians enjoy free rides at their behest.
The public passivity is worse than Munshi Prem Chand’s infamous duo characters of a son and a father, “Madhu and Gaissu,” in his masterpiece, “The Kafan”. Both feasted to their fill in the city where they had gone to buy ‘kafan” for Madhu’s wife with the money given to them by the people for the purpose. Madhu’s wife had died in child-birth a night earlier as they sat outside, eating hot potatoes which they had stolen from the people’s fields while the pain-drenched cries of the dying woman kept falling incessantly on their ears. Pakistan can easily be likened to Madhu’s wife and the heartless people to Madhu and Gaissu.
People made of stone only remain so unconcerned and so passive as do appear the people of Pakistan. Nations that are alive, and who have a tinge of gentleness, honesty, courage, dignity, honor, self-respect, good temper, a sense of justice, a desire to strive and change, and above all, a sense of righteousness left in them, they refuse to put up with the trite, with those who are power-hungry like animals, but are devoid of humanity; who never repent and never regret because they are ordained to remain so. Nations that are alive they do not tolerate even 10% of what is happening around the people of Pakistan, politically, socially, economically and morally. This outright molestation of people by the barbarians who have perched themselves over their heads in the name of giving democracy a chance should not have been acceptable even for one day. Where is Pakistan’s Ata Turk who may jump like he did on a bench and shout, “If those who are present see the problem in its natural light, I believe they will agree. If not… only some heads will be cut off”. His vision and dictatorial actions saved Turkey from total annihilation and dismemberment in 1920. Some leaders in Pakistan have earned their own doom. The day of reckoning is not very far.
In a 1995 film, Rob Roy, there is an interesting dialogue between a son and father. The son asks the father as to what is honor. The father tells his son, “All men with honor are kings - but not all kings have honor… honor is what no man can give you, and none can take away. Honor is a man’s gift to himself… honor grows in you and speaks to you. All you need to do is listen.”
The politicians in Pakistan have money, but they are neither rich nor honorable because they are without a sense of personal honor; they are without a class. They lack both: personality as well as character. In personality they are made by tailors, and what character means is beyond their vocabulary. Character and its essential principles of integrity, courage, justice, patience, honesty, truthfulness, selflessness and compassion lead people to eternal success. The irony of the matter is that the people of Pakistan have knowingly and willingly chosen for themselves such people as their leaders who are characterless; who are fake in matter of life; and who are cruel because they are arrogant and are heedless, and the unfortunate part is that they insist on being so because it is politics.
They can be likened to the man who once lost his ring at night and began looking for it under a lamp post, and kept doing so for hours. Another man desirous of helping him came to him and said, “Are you sure you lost your ring here?” “No”, he said, “In fact, I lost it about three hundred yards away, but since it is light here, therefore, I am looking for it here”. Give a thousand years to Mian Nawaz Sharif, Mr. Altaf Hussain and the incumbent leadership of PPP, Mr. Zardari, they would exactly do the same to the people of Pakistan what they have done, and even worse. What was started by Mr. Altaf Hussain in the name of unity for his followers has now come full circle. All ethnic groups are now fully armed; they all have their own militia, and are ready to outdo each other. It was too dangerous a game to start with; now the end is in total civil war. I clearly foresee a massacre at a scale carried out by the Hutus on the Tutsies in Rwanda in 1994.
Syed Talat Hussain is right when he in his article, “How not to govern”, published in the Dawn, July 11 writes, “No city in the world, not even Kabul or Baghdad… has seen the kind of brutality that Karachi citizens witnessed last week. Even in Kurram Agency, where a full-fledged military operation is underway against militants, the death toll remained far less than the sad scorecard from Pakistan’s financial nerve center displayed during the days when murder peaked”. The lovers of the Zardari government, however, opine that Talat had been unfair in equating Karachi with Sindh as a whole. This contention is as silly as to say that a damaged brain or a failed heart does not necessarily affect the other parts of the body.
Any leadership in power with an iota of integrity and character under the circumstances would have resigned, but not the power-hungry, greedy and heedless current brand of leadership. The President like before had had a joy ride at the people’s expense at a cost of $200 million in London, attending his daughter’s graduation and introducing her and his son to the 10 Downing Street. A similar pattern existed during the 2010 flood times. The Yahoos of Gulliver’s Travels have had better sense than the people of Pakistan who have accepted this kind of leadership. Talat says, “What explains Karachi’s game of death is primarily incompetence and incapability - a lethal combination when mixed with corruption and mismanagement”, and I attribute it to the people’s tacit acceptance of them. No people can reach their destination by holding a wrong roadmap. Change is the answer. In Tunisia, the cycle of change was started not by a Spartan, but by a humbled vendor. Is there any shortage of such vendors in Pakistan?
Mr. Mowahid Hussain Shah in his article, “Change or the Same?” (Pakistan Link, July 18), appears skeptical when he writes, “Disgust with the present setup has generated a clamor for change…the choice in change is not necessarily between good and bad. Rather, it can be between bad and worse…” He also cites three examples which are not very relevant to the topic.
Change is the key to progress; it is a sure step towards improvement as it averts an extinction. Evil hills and mountains grow, so why not humans. Individuals like all living things must grow or they die. That is the law of nature, and that is what Islam aims at. Islam and the Qur’an target not the mind, not the thinking but the Qalb because all change generates in there. If the change worsens an erstwhile situation, then it is not a change, it is degeneration. Human character does not improve unless it undergoes a change, and change involves recognition of the wrong done; a resolve to not repeat it, and a consistency in the resolve.
The scribe of this article will share many a historical instance that brought about big changes in the lives of people though the steps were tiny. Courage, tenacity and ingenuity can really carve out a big change in a country like Pakistan if even small steps are taken in that direction. Small steps, small acts that may appear pointless and insignificant at the time, but that will deliver rich results. Small and harmless initiatives of defiance and resistance often set the wheel of change rolling. Manmohan Singh, as finance minister during Narsama Rao’s premiership in late 80’s, gave a wonderful piece of advice to him: India in any way is about to default, but it still has two options. One is, it reverses its financial policies and yet defaults; the other is, it defaults without doing anything. In the first choice, at least there is some hope; in the second one, the result is obvious”.
It was that risk for a change in the Nehruvian policy that made India what it is today. In recent times we saw it happening in the Middle East, in Egypt, in Tunisia and in Qatar and Bahrain. (Continued next week)
