The Change in Pakistan: “Wearing Tight Shoes without Socks”
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold: Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere: The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst: Are full of passionate intensity.”
- W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
Think of a person riding a motor bike with his wife and child at the back-seat, and the motor-bike slips, hurling his wife and child on to the road, and the crowd relishing the scene. Or think about a time that you dropped your lunch in the college cafeteria, and your rivals laughed at you heartily; or think of an old man holding a paper bag of medicines in one hand and a walking stick in the other, and making desperate efforts to cross a busy road, and no one giving him a helping hand. And if you cannot think of these situations, then think of a time that you bought a pair of shoes that turned out to be tight on your feet, and you yet chose to wear it and that too without socks. These scenarios speak of the country – Pakistan - that a generation ago we left behind.
It is all messed up there. The good and the evil are all so intertwined that it has become exceedingly hard to sift the one from the other. Has ‘good’ disappeared altogether from Pakistan? Certainly not. It is there in abundance, but has only become toothless, and pliant for it lacks ‘conviction’ to assert itself, and has lost the ability to be effective. Can this kind of impotent and ineffective good, lacking ‘all conviction’ be of any practical use in a society so mired in chaos? Simply believing in what is good is neither enough, nor of any practical use. It is rather dangerous because it is deceptive. On the contrary, it is the evil, and ‘the worst’ that have got an upper hand, because they appear all charged with the velocity and vitality, having the kind of ‘passionate intensity’, that Yeats is talking about. And that precisely is the reason that the evil is prospering and booming because the good is silent; because the good stands compromised.
The people of Pakistan were neither dumb nor blind, nor were they deranged at the time when they made the silly choice of buying tight shoes - the current brand of Members of the Parliament. They deliberately and in all consciousness, first chose to wear them notwithstanding their tightness, and then wore them even without socks. First redness, then blisters and boils, and then spread of infection, then began their limp-walking for months, to count only a few consequences, and that is the political price that now they are constrained to pay. So long as they keep making such silly choices: first voting for people who are ineligible, and then putting up with them, and even re-electing them, as these are not simple errors of judgment, they are punishable crimes. Their current plight is directly connected with the choices they had made in the past.
The real dilemma in Pakistan is that the good, though in majority, has not only become silent, but it also has begun feeling somewhat embarrassed to be “good’. In fact, good has become shy of taking the step to remedy the situation - to rush and help the fallen child and wife of the motor-bike rider, to buy lunch for you instead of sitting and making fun of you, and to hold the old man’s hand and lead him to the other side of the road. Things have got so much messed up in all walks of life, especially in politics, and in the civic and social life that it is hard to distinguish the right from the wrong. Anarchy, with all the passionate intensity, has become rampant; the ‘blood-dimmed tide,’ and the loss of innocence is too obvious to warrant any comments. Think of Noah’s flood, drowning and destroying anything that came in its way, and Hazrat Noah not being allowed to save his son and wife. Yeats wrote this prophetic poem, “The Second Coming”, after the First World War when Europe was what Pakistan is today.
Today Pakistan is trapped in a similar situation which is hurting it as much from the inside as it is hurting it from the outside. “Blindness to the finer things of life,” as the Qur’an, says has come full circle…. And as Allah says in the Qur’an, “And we have covered them up; so that they cannot see”, is all too obvious. Nature is just about getting ready to take its course. Eventually, when the process starts, a good amount of good will also automatically get destroyed before the evil meets its end. And this price, the good will have to pay for remaining silent and ineffective, standing there just as a detached spectator; for lacking the necessary, “conviction”, and not showing the impulse to act when it was time to do so.
Such is the complexity of problems confronting the world these days that even the very best, the most qualified, and the most efficient are finding it hard to untie the economic, social, political and moral knots of these problems. The solutions lie in timely action taken boldly with full understanding of those complexities. For example, Bangladesh finally felt constrained to oust their sole Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, according to the New York Times from the Grameen Bank as wished by the central national bank with endorsement from the Bangladesh High Court. The reason being that he had passed the retirement age. But the real cause was that his microfinance schemes to extend small loans to female village entrepreneurs to fight poverty had begun controversial, and had begun back-firing as alleged by Sheikh Hasina. These schemes had begun “sucking the blood from the poor in the name of poverty alleviation.” Lamia Karim was the woman who burst the bubble of micro-financing when she proved that the ground realities were different. The loans were used by men, and that the repayment of loans was not a valid indicator that the condition of women was improving as a result of these loans. In fact, it had become a sort of double burden on the women. It had resulted in worsening the condition of women at home.
Next door, India, which in the leadership of Mr. Manmohan Singh saw some unprecedented economic boom for over a decade, is now turning ungrateful to him, and is finding him ineffective, weak and spineless. According to the Economist of June 9, 2012, the people are thinking that it is time for a change at the top. “Mr. Singh has plainly run out of steam”. The only hitch is that “there are no appealing candidates to replace him”. .. Rahul, the heir apparent, has been a disappointment. Rahul, unlike Bilawal Bhutto, did not sit safe under the arm-pit of his father for photo-ops sessions with world leaders. He, in fact, staked his political reputation by attempting to revive the Congress party’s popularity in a state that the Congress had not ruled in 22 years, the Uttar Pradesh (UP).
It was a Herculean job which Rahul undertook. Upper Pradesh is India’s most populous state and it provides the biggest single bloc of seats in the Indian parliament. At the state level, it has 403 seats. UP also is one of the country’s worst performers in several socio-economic indices, says The Indian Express in its March 02, 2012 edition. Rahul, 42, attempted to make his bones there. His entry into the state, and participation in the UP’s farmers politics was anticipated and was banned. But he managed to sneak in and make his appearance at Dadri in Ghaziabad dist of UP. His aim was to reach out the poor people, especially the farmers who had grievances against the faulty land acquisition policy of the Mayawati government. The farmers felt they were jilted and had not been properly compensated for their land (the Riaz Malik scenario) which the government had acquired to build a highway. Like conventional politicians, Rahul also compromised on this issue, and did not speak out his heart, fearing it would upset the mood of the main leadership, and the elections of 2014. People had come to listen to him, but he refrained from mentioning the problems that he had assured to address a year earlier in May. Instead, he repeated the usual mantra and remained focused on bashing Maayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav and the “larger issues”… he just did not talk about the local issues…he did not strike the chord with the locals.
The result has been that in popularity, Rahul, the scion of the Nehru dynasty, began trailing, and fell behind Gujrat’s Chief Minister, Narendra Modi who in popular polls has been at 24%, while Rahul’s remained at 17%. The beauty of democracy in India is that the voters have learned the value of their vote. Hero-worship is there, but it is fast eroding and receding. People did not make a statue of Manmohan Singh and begin worshipping him because he had made India a semi-super-power. India, “bereft of leaders, an Asian giant is destined for a period of lower growth. The human cost will be immense.” Writes the Economist of June 9. The moment the Indian economic miracle began looking like a mirage, the dissatisfaction of people became all too self-evident. This is what indicates that the people are ‘alive’. But not so in Pakistan.
All blame fell on the gentlest prime minister. ManMohan Singh had promised that the sustained economic growth would lift hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty, and quickly too. It did not happen. He had promised that jobs would be created for all the young people who would reach the working age in the coming years. It did not happen. Instead, the currency slumped, private investment shrank. The Economist says that Indian slow down is all home-made. The problem has been looming, but no steps were taken on time. The PM was in power, but not in authority. The state kept borrowing too much; it permitted a mushroom growth of private firms that exploited the labor. The inflation kept soaring. And worst of all, the government failed to pass any big, meaningful and effective reform bill for years. Kick-backs, graft, corruption and confusion and redtapism further added fuel to the wrath of people, harmed investment, and the high-handed view of foreign investors further made a big current-account deficit harder to finance. The result: the Indian rupee plunged. The increase in the number of millionaires does not mean an automatic decrease in the number of poor people. (Continued next week)
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