Pakistan: Politics, Fog and the Culture of Confusion - 2
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“A Wizard told him in these words our fate: at length Corruption, like a general Flood shall deluge all.”
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
It makes an interesting study to read how leaders react when they fall or slip from a high office. Very few choose to walk away in complacency, contending that they had had a good innings. Most are seen rubbing their hands in remorse, yearning for yet another chance. Even Churchill, with the best record as a politician, could not escape the feelings of self-pity when the time to quit came. Mr. Roedad Khan in his book, “Pakistan… records that his words, “Here I am after almost thirty years in the House of Commons, after holding many of the highest offices of State. Here I am discarded, cast away, marooned, rejected and disliked”. Pg 168
Georges Danton, a leading figure in the early stages of the French Revolution - 1794, and the first President of the Committee of Public Safety, on the change of fate, when being taken to the scaffold, regretted for being in prominence, and said, “It is better to be a poor fisherman than to govern men.” It was the scaffold that perhaps made him think so.
President Harry S. Truman perhaps is an exception who wished in life to be either “a piano player in a whorehouse”, or “a politician”. “And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference. I, for sure believe the piano player job to be much more honorable than that of politicians.” After retirement in 1952, he lived on his meager Army Pension of only $13,507 a year, which the Congress on its own move, raised to $25,000. He bought stamps with his own money and licked them with his own tongue. When offered lucrative corporate positions at large salaries, he was heard saying, “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it’s not for sale.” Leaders in high office speak in measured tones, and with utter dignity. Not like the Pakistani Prime Minister, who keeps shooting more from his mouth than from his hips, too bad in either case.
Robert Todd Lincoln, the only surviving child of President Lincoln never tried for the high station his father had held. On the fateful day of April 14, in 1865, he had just arrived after traveling for several days that his father, President Lincoln, invited him to attend a play at Ford’s Theatre. Robert declined for being tired. That night President Lincoln got shot, leaving Robert to regret all his life for not being with his parents.
Later in life on two more occasions, he witnessed two more presidents being shot while he was present: President Garfield in 1881, and President William McKinley in 1901. He began to think that he was a magnetic for ill-fate. He made one resolve - never to attend a function in which the President of America was present. When invited by the President, he is quoted as saying, “No, I’m not going, and they’d better not ask me, because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”
Did President Zardari or any of his three children, ever think that they had had enough of politics? Often the PPP leadership is heard stating in loud tones, “We alone have carried four dead bodies on our shoulders.” Did history teach them anything? No. Politics and vitamins are two different items. It is just silly to assume that the children of the Olympians are the only ones who should represent the country in Olympics because they carry the best “sperm-pool”. At least in Pakistan, politics works like that.
The country, Pakistan, is in a state of total confusion and anarchy, and the President of Pakistan is found in Myanmar on a grooming tour of his children in foreign affairs, busy in conferring Benazir Democracy Award on Suu Kyi, the Nobel Laureate opposition leader. If he can discover some ‘virtues’ in the opposition leader of Mynamar, why can’t he see any such stuff in the opposition leaders in Pakistan? Pakistan since long would have come out of the woods if he had practiced at home what he is preaching abroad. With 119 heart patients dead and thousands in jeopardy due to the taking of a tampered medicine in Punjab; and a city like Karachi busy in picking up the dead bodies of five lawyers in one week, the bewildered people of Pakistan find the head of their government, Mr. Gilani, at Davos. The fear is that in the midst of 1400 chief executives and heads of state gathered there, he may not ‘open his mouth’ in as indiscreet a manner as he is prone to. When the house is on fire, the first priority is to extinguish the fire and save those who are trapped inside, and then run out to seek help for its reconstruction.
On March 26, 1969, President Ayub Khan in a farewell address announced his departure in such fateful words. The element of regret as to what will happen to this nation after him was amply there. “…I never thought our people would go mad like this… I doubt if in our political life we will have a good man for a long time. Thank God we have an army. I have held this country together for ten years. It was like keeping a number of frogs in one basket. What sort of Pakistan will emerge, is anybody’s guess. There will be either force or mob rule. I hope we can find some answer between the two.” Self-illusion and personal indispensability are the two most dangerous ailments in Pakistani politics. It requires a lion’s heart to have the grace of self-criticism, an element which is unfortunately missing in our brand of leaders.
The only good thing about the military rulers in Pakistan had been that they had never been able to perpetuate themselves through their progeny. They stayed doomed for just one shot. The simple people of Pakistan, at least, have this much wisdom. History and fate both had joined hands in the effort to take care of them. General Yahya Khan lived a humiliated life after the debacle of East Pakistan; General Zia ul Haque succumbed to the forces of Fate; and his son notwithstanding all the patronage, could not rise above the rank of a minister. President Ayub Khan in 1964, and General Pervez Musharraf in 2004, partially succeeded in prolonging their rule, but the efforts thus made became a primary cause of their downfall. General Musharraf’s plight out of the four is most pitiable. At least the other three have had the luxury to stay in the country, or die in the country that they had served. He stands denied even that much privilege too. Nor he appears to be having the courage to come back. How precious a gift life is he is beginning to realize it now.
With the civilian politicians, the story is different. While good leadership is like the prized perfume, whose every scented waft becomes a harbinger of astonishing freshness, bad leadership, on the contrary, is worse than the stink of a skunk which can’t be washed out , not even with the water of the seven seas. They are like the ugly Greek goddess, Medusa who had snakes instead of hair on her head. This paradoxical monster, apparently sacred and protective, was otherwise very destructive. It was a combination of beauty and horror both. In literature it is synonymous with ambiguity, because its enchanting stares mesmerize the innocent with a view to destroying them by turning them into stone. It was also indestructible as the more its hair-snakes were cut, the more they grew.
Our politicians are as toxic as was Medusa. Glenn Beck even compares such bad leaders with cockroaches. “Both have an uncanny ability to survive, consume all things living or dead, and can apparently live up to one month without their head - though I would argue that politicians can survive much longer than that.” Like the in-growing nails, they keep growing, keep torturing and tormenting the people, never fading, never leaving them alone. Much of the disorder and corruption in Pakistan is because of these politicians. Pakistan virtually is now being ruled by the third dynastic batch of rulers because about 80% members of the parliament are the children or grandchildren of the erstwhile rulers.
Kevin Phillips in the introduction of his book, “Bad Money”, makes a very interesting and intriguing assertion when he says, “For centuries, the importance of harvest time in the affairs of men made August and September months notorious for declarations of war, crop failures, and, eventually, bank crisis…in the United States, observed one Chronicler, crisis came in August and September, most notably in 1837, 1857, and 1873, when Western banks required large inflows from the East to finance shipments of cereals.”.
The assertion is not as baseless as it appears. The Napoleonic wars, the First World War, and as recently as the 9/11 tragedy of 2001, they all took place in these two fateful months. Pakistan has not been an exception. The only positive thing that happened to Pakistan in August was its creation in 1947, but as regards the rest of its history in relation to all the major fateful and unfortunate events that happened, they invariably took place in these two months. Be it the Kashmir war in 1948 or the September war of 1965, they occurred in September. If we add July and October as the two bonus months to these seasonal tragic months of August and September, then it would not be very wrong to say that about 70% of Pakistan’s misfortunes get chronicled in these four months. With a little variation, all the four military takeovers took place in these four months. With the jawaans on the annual harvesting long leave, as the tradition is, the generals get busy in the business of how to set the country on the right track in these four months.
How gradually Pakistan became a Dickensian Bleak House is a big question. As asserted above, it has much to do with its history and politics, but there is a third factor too. A good portion of the blame needs to be apportioned to the weather. Dickens Bleak House deals with the corruption, and the delaying tactics that were prevalent and were adopted by the attorneys, with a view to ripping the people of their hard earned wages. They would parse and wrangle in the courts over trifles, resulting in the promotion of injustice in the Chancery- the Department of Justice. Dickens in this wonderful novel paints in a graphic manner how institutions inevitably succumb to the problems for the address of which they had been initially created. Justice depends upon injustice, so the Chancery ( as it is now in our courts), makes money by being in the business of righting injustice, but ends up in promoting more and more of injustice.
Corruption in Pakistan is the ringing problem. In order to end corruption, new anti-corruption departments had been created, and each department ended up in the promotion of more corruption. There are about two dozen such departments. As they multiplied, so did corruption.
PAKISTAN AND FOG: Human values and their subjective states are very much co-related to the vagaries of weather. London fog in Bleak House, signifies the foggy confusion that prevailed in the courts and in the people. Endless mechanizations of the Justice department, the presence of rain, darkness, fog, mud, dirt, graves, fiendish appearances, all these have been reflections of people’s moral debasement, and a mirror of the despicable apathy and insensitivity of those who were in power.
What would Karim Bux, Nazeer Mistri, Niko fruit vendor, Basheera Dhobi and Victor barber, of my native mohalla in Pakistan understand what Presidential immunity is; what contempt of court means; what the heck this Memo-gate is about, and who actually owns the $ 55 millions lying idle in the Swiss banks? Sheikh Rashid is matchless only in one art - the art of coining phrases and epithets. The other day he compared the people of Pakistan to the “fallen leaves of autumn”, which are a source of cool shade when green, and as good fertilizer, when dead. The naïve people of Pakistan commit the mistake of giving their consent in elections for a purpose just for once, and these thugs cleverly convert their innocent consent into a “five-year Nikka Contract”- a legal right to keep them in the status of a concubine for a period of full five years.
When people get disillusioned with every thing, even with religion, they tend to become superstitious, and begin to rely too much on fate and chance. Character once used to be a powerful factor in the success and destruction of people. Plato even called character as fate. But that is an outdated point of view now. Corruption has formally been accepted as a virtue, and debauchery a good public relations ploy, honesty an art of the foolish; loyalty to one woman a sickening conservatism. So let us not waste time in dilating upon the virtues of character. It is a relic of the past.
Weather in Pakistan, it appears, is sharp becoming an agent, an accomplice of those who bring miseries in their lives. First it mirrors what the people of Pakistan are going through. Fog that keeps enwrapping Pakistan from Sahiwal to Kala Shah Kaku to Pindi Bhatian, to Sargodha to Sheikhupura for months, is not just a mere thickness of water. It is much more than that. It is a graphic reflection of what is going on in Pakistan. Fog symbolically is a sign of depression and gloom; it signifies the doubts that crowd the minds of people; it is a sign of confusion and despair that exists in all walks of life.
Fog is also a symbol of loss, the loss of light and clarity; the loss of security and of self-knowledge. Darkness is closely associated with doubt and mistrust. Even in the Arabic culture, fog is an indication of an atmosphere in which people are crazy with their faith as is the case now, and are embroiled in spiritual doubts. In Mr. Iftikhar Ahmed’s TV program, titled, “Awam Ki Adalat Mai”, the proposition under discussion was, “Religious radicalism is the main cause of the problems of Pakistan.” In the beginning before the advancement of arguments the people present in the hall voted in favor of the proposition to the tune of 78% in favor and 22% against it.
After the debate, as expected, 98% voted in favor, and 2% against it. Fog has settled in the minds. It even hints about for substantial financial losses that the country has been accruing in every field. The thicker the fog, the more tense is the helplessness of people. Patches of fog denote the unsettled personal relations and tensions that exist in people as they deal with each other, showing that people are not open and upright with each other in any matter of life; they conceal things from each other. In Persian literature, fog indicates the lack of foresight, and hints of the occurrence of a financial disaster likely to take place due to people’s own guilt.
The floods of 2010 and 2011, the earthquake of 2005, the dengue fever of 2011; and now the death of over 119 heart patients due to a defective medicine given to them, all these are the ‘Re-awakening” calls. They are asking the people to do some soul-searching and recognize and admit what is wrong, and then serving as a flapper, they are urging them to wake up from their stupor and engage themselves in the business of setting the house in order. The Qur’an is very adamant when it says that every community or nation gets what it deserves. The Umma gets, “What its hands have earned.”
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