People in Pakistan have long ceased to ask such questions as, “Why the religion of Islam is not allowed to accommodate the existence of minorities though you, the Quaid, accommodated them in the national flag? Why is there such an open-ended free-hand for the corrupt and the powerful? Why is there such an inhuman disparity between the rich and the poor? Which way is the country heading in the comity of nations? Why doesn’t the corrupt and inept leadership in Pakistan end up in jails? - Photo The Daily Guardian
A Letter to the Quaid
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“The government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is a force like fire! It is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.” - George Washington.
Dear Quaid,
I was five years old when you single-handedly created a homeland for us. I remember vividly that we had to migrate to our new homeland, riding virtually an ox-driven cart, laden with family members and essentials, moving at a snail's pace in a caravan. We camped on the way at places strewn with mutilated and rotten human bodies and animals, but we kept on moving with stars in our eyes in the hope of starting our lives in a new Utopia.
The journey, otherwise, of less than 150 miles, sometimes appeared to be stretching into eternity due to its arduousness, but it was never without a light that constantly flickered at the end of a tunnel of suffering. We knew where we were heading; we were not rudderless or even homeless. It is only after reaching the destination that we discovered that we were refugees and outsiders. The journey took us three life-survivals attacked by the ruffians, and some 75 days, including a two-month stay at a refugee camp. But we got our Pakistan.
Camping near Shahdara, Lahore on the damp soil under the naked, starry sky, I remember clearly a policeman calling aloud my father’s name, “Noor Ellahi”. I nudged my mother to hearken to the call. It turned out that a policeman was carrying none else but my younger, sickly brother on his shoulders who had wandered away. There was poverty, helplessness, and homelessness, but there was a character in the people as we found in that noble policeman, and there was hope and desire to start all over afresh in a dreamland. What should our leaders - the Pakistan-born - know what price people had to pay and what sacrifices we had to make to have a piece of land we could call our own? How little did we know then what shape Pakistan would assume in the future?
In retrospect, now that I live comfortably in America, I liken this journey of mine to Independence to the 102 Pilgrims who first sailed in the Mayflower in 1620 to reach America - a free land - after a voyage of 63 days.
My father’s only qualification was that he was a small landowner; a classmate and distant relative of the only educated and well-placed bureaucrat, Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, and an England-returned guy - as if it were a qualification. The result was that it was people like us who stood marked to get a real taste of what Pakistan actually was to be, or is. We as farmers, stayed landless and homeless for over five years because we like millions of refugees had been, “disconnected, and resource-less” in a country that early on learned to thrive on nepotism, graft, corruption, and multiple other social evils. Pakistan, soon after its inception, became a land of loot and plunder.
In the 1958 Matriculation examination, I secured a perfect 200/200 in Math, with a position in the entire school, but was unable to join a college because the family still remained wrapped in financial constraints after 11 years of Independence. Mine was not a unique case. There were hundreds and thousands of young people like me who had to struggle more; had to suffer more, before life in Pakistan could begin to smile on them. We as young people, did not make our helplessness a virtue, nor did we attempt to find any spiritual message in our sufferings. We didn’t let our “Miskineat- (helplessness), settle into our souls in the form of “Buai Gadai - the hunger of a beggar,” as Allama Iqbal would put it. We emerged far better in later years in life being successful in all fields -knowledge, financial well-being, self-contentment, etc. than these current super-rich beggars who have neither character, nor discipline, nor faith, nor unity. Their hunger for power and wealth even beats King Midas’ craze for gold. Dear Quaid, your Pakistan is now owned and ruled by them.
The Nation has just celebrated its 77th Independence Day, not with a sense of gratitude and pleasure, but with a grand plan of protests; with a call to totally shutting down the country. In America here, people sometimes ask how would Jefferson react to the “Affirmative Action- equal opportunity to all even at the expense of merit”, or how would the Founder of this Nation, George Washington view the invasion of Iraq. People in Pakistan have long ceased to ask such questions as, “Why the religion of Islam is not allowed to accommodate the existence of minorities though you, the Quaid, accommodated them in the national flag? Why is there such an open-ended free-hand for the corrupt and the powerful? Why is there such an inhuman disparity between the rich and the poor? Which way is the country heading in the comity of nations? Why doesn’t the corrupt and inept leadership in Pakistan end up in jails?
The House you built, Pakistan, had been occupied over 52 times (including 24 prime ministers, 17 Presidents-cum-dictators, 4 governor generals, and 7 caretaker prime ministers, mostly by force by different tenants-rulers. Only one willingly vacated it (Chaudhri Muhammad Ali), more than 6 had to be evicted by force (Chundrigar, Suharwardy, Malik Noon, Ghulam Ashaq Khan, Ms Benazir and Mian Nawaz Sharif); 5 had to be bluntly thrown out (Nazimuddin, Bogra, Junejo, Ms Benazir, and Mian Nawaz Sharif); nine were conditionally permitted to
live under the thick shade of power for less than a year; two even for less than a month; and still when this House of yours could not be looked after properly, seven caretakers, five local and two imported ones, had to be inducted in. Three Heads of this House of yours (Ghulam Mohammad, Iskander Mirza, and General Zia), went into the pages of history for having ousted the maximum number of elected incumbents - two times, three times, and three times respectively; one prime minister came into power four times (once only for a month till shown the exit door by a general), and yet did not learn how to govern, or how to honorably accept that the job is too much for him.
And yet as of today as these lines are being penned, this House of yours remains eternally in bad shape even after having been legally supervised by 29 Chief Justices. Those who followed you after your death in 1948, took away with them its doors, windows and even the tapestry, leaving the poor inhabitants utterly exposed to the elements of nature and unbridled human appetites. The Guards that were employed, the army, did not lag behind in any way. They virtually usurped it four times with a view to putting it back on the track, but ended up getting embroiled in the glory of power and prestige. They even supervised the dismemberment of your house in 1971.
Very few did some maintenance or patch-work, but none did add even a single new brick to it. After 77 years of its existence, it still gives the look of a Wasteland, a chaotic country inhabited by terrorists and religious fanatics; a country whose leaders created new havens for themselves in foreign lands, but held it as if it were their inheritance, and hence their right to rule over it. Each occupant now holding a crowbar and a shovel, appears more intent and even busier than ever before in digging a grave for it, in ditching and dismembering it of whatever little is left of it.
It is not the House alone that is in shape. Even your own good name is at stake. Your slogan of “Faith, Unity and Discipline” is deemed as a mere empty cliché, and is termed as outdated and obsolete. Faith has become fanaticism, an ulterior show of rituals; unity is reduced to family and sectarian affiliation; and discipline has become a sign of weakness and a sign of powerlessness. This year’s 14th of August had been a real scene for the world.
What is missing in Pakistani leadership is the kind of sterling character that you, O Quaid, possessed. In America, says Gordon S. Wood in his book, “Revolutionary Characters”, “No other major nation honors its past historical characters, especially characters who existed two centuries ago, in quite the manner we Americans do.” They fought a revolution and gave America a Constitution. The Pakistani people are hardly ever reminded that the country was created by a man called Quaid i Azam in a charismatic manner. His vision of Pakistan, his ideas and desires are deliberately shelved or pushed back. It was he who transformed a minority into a majority by redefining both.
The so-called biased and sponsored historian Mr Ishtiaq Ahmed, in his book, “Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History,” on page 549 presents the most conscientious, most intelligent and most honest PM of Pakistan, and the best Finance Minister, Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, in such derogatory terms as, “In the Emergence of Pakistan, he, (Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, unabashedly defended and justified the Creation of Pakistan, holding the Caste System and Congress leaders responsible for Muslims’ demanding Pakistan.” In the view of this sponsored historian, “Jinnah was playing for some higher stakes that Jinnah’s inner circle was aware of connections with Churchill and others”. The Tamils, Sikhs, Dalits and the Muslims living in India under Modi’s rule can better appreciate the creation of Pakistan than Mr Ashfaq Ahmed. Mr Ashfaq Ahmed did not rot in the camps, nor did he walk bare-foot to this land. A mother who goes through the pangs of childbirth, knows better what love is than the father who just asks, “Is it a boy?”
Now like Paine with whom Stephen P. Cohen once compared the Quaid in his book, “The Idea of Pakistan, page 28, the main leadership in Pakistan in all its phases has deliberately attempted to sideline the Quaid, just the way the Americans and even the American Founding Fathers, did to Tom Paine.
Tom Paine visualized a decent and happy life for the ordinary people, so did the Quaid; Paine boldly rejected tyranny and injustice, be it present in the British monarchy or in the leadership; so did the Quaid; Paine’s cry then was, “For God’s sake, let us come to a final separation… the birthday of a new world is at hand.”, so was the Quaid’s zest and appeal to a divided and chaotic Muslim Ummah. Tom Paine even in his lifetime, because of his radical ideas on religion, got sidelined. Once the greatest public intellectual, who wrote such heart-wrenching lines as “these are the times that try men’s souls”, now stands shunned by all. The Quaid is being subjected to this treatment now. A whole crop of new Quaids under a personality cult is being created. An MQM worker cannot utter two lines without quoting Altaf Bhai; the PPP devotees almost worship Bhuttos; PML (N) sycophants and cronies survive under the canopy of Sharif brothers; Tahir ul Qadri followers almost touch his knees before they speak a word; Imran Khan is cultivating his own cult. Add to these Maulana Fazlul Rehman and others. The country is well-crowded with Quaids. But where is the Gentleman Quaid like you, a man of character and conviction?
The word gentleman now has assumed different meanings. Perhaps cadets in the Kakul Academy still use it. It has lost its original meaning and connotations. A gentleman was always a man of good manners and morals, “a man of good behavior, well-bred, amiable, high-minded, who knows how to act in any society, in the company of any man; a man characterized by politeness, grace, taste, learning, and character; a man who would think and act alike; a man who would always be reasonable, tolerant, honest, virtuous, and candid, unbiased, just as well as frank and sincere. Being a gentleman meant being above prejudices, parochialism, and religious biases. The Quaid was a gentleman politician, and the qualities of a gentleman counted above were a kind of prerequisite for being a politician. Now character forms a tiny part of a politician’s personality. Once honor, name, and reputation preoccupied great politicians; now the number of flour and sugar mills; ill-earned wealth, and heedlessness. Vulgarity, barbarism and crudeness are additional positive traits of an effective politician.
The American Revolution succeeded because it was envisaged by men of character. Those who wanted to make money, they always begged to be relieved of the burden of the office. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, both retired not to relax in solitude and leisure of a rural retreat but to the making of money in the busyness and bustle of a city law practice. Several of the most prominent founders of America, such as financier of the Revolution Robert Morris and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court James Wilson, both ended up in debtor’s prison, writes Gordon S. Wood. In Pakistan, the most corrupt and the most visible defaulters, still rule the country. In fact, the politicians have now entrenched their hirelings in the civil service, judiciary and in financial set-ups.
The American Revolution was not initiated by the imposition of taxes, as it is often alleged; Taxes were just an excuse. The American revolutionaries had sold a dream that offered the promise of a brighter and better future for its citizens. Taxes create fears and hatred, and act as the first drop for the proverbial rain. In this era of inequalities and alienation, and divisions, where are the politicians who may offer a viable and workable roadmap of the future, and a tangible solution to the inhuman inflation in Pakistan. Chaudhri Muhammad Ali did that in the 1950s. The New York Times declared him as the smartest Finance Minister in the world. His best qualification was that he had virtually tasted, “What poverty is. And how the poor people feel and suffer?”
Pakistan has been deliberately transformed into a nation that is unequal, anxious and angry, and these are not very healthy signs for a nation. Bad economies act like a spark, often leading to a lethal conflagration. Wake up, and read what happened in Rwanda in the recent past, or in France in the 18th Century. All the four ingredients leading to a bloody revolution: namely, war-mongering, growing bureaucracy, high spending, and corruption are there. Alas, O Quaid, we as a nation did not do well. We are sorry.
