“Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave and eats bread it does not harvest.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, and farewells him with hooting, only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.”
Kahlil Gibran: “The Garden of the Prophet”
Also to be pitied are the people who refuse to recognise the corrupt and would like to anoint them again as rulers to partake of their loot; people who speak of the glory of the past, but remain unwilling to endeavour to create a matching future; people who are fond of semantics, but not eager to come good on their words; people who are critical of crime, but reluctant to punish the criminal; people who do not obey the law, but are ever ready to become the law unto themselves; people who respect not their teachers, but eulogise dogma and superstition; people who have no empathy for the poor, but submit before the tyrant and the despot; people who protect not their honour and readily sell their soul to the devil; people who scoff at those speaking the truth and embrace wholeheartedly the culture of fraudulent practises; and people who glorify the corrupt and shun the honest.
The list of infirmities is infinite. The more one goes along, the more one loses hope in a future for such people who are so glaringly and so comprehensively deprived of character, self-respect and dignity. There are instances galore where one’s appraisal gets a boost of further evidence that so irremediable is the condition of such people that they are deeply immersed in a pit from where there is no apparent retrieval.
They continue to cherish the hope that the Bhutto/Zardari and Sharif clans would extricate them from the clutches of despair and despondency they are buried under. One can only pity such people who become a burden for the country they inhabit!
Such people are loaded with all that they should despise, but remain shy of what they should fondly espouse and follow. They are bound to become a drag for the polity they are part of and an embarrassment for the country they inhabit. The worst part is that, with the passage of time, they are plunging further into depths of depravity. That is when such people are construed as having become a burden for the very act of living.
This is by far the net outcome of what we have become over 74 years of independence. It is difficult to fathom that one moment in time when it started sliding downward– a slide which, unfortunately, continues to this day with virtually no signs of abating in the future. The most unfortunate part was that, very early on, we ended up with a brand of rulers who preferred their personal interests over those of the state. In promoting their self-aggrandising agenda, these leaders were not shy of employing the most degenerate tactics. In doing so, they also injected the germs of lawlessness and a fondness for corrupt practices among the general public who quickly took to it and turned this into a legitimate source for advancing further in life. That was the beginning of the fall which has continued with increasing gravity with time.
The real slide started with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who epitomised a malevolent lust for power, no matter what be the cost. He also contributed to the shaping of a religiosity-laden state simply as a means to fight his political opponents. He did this after playing a critical role in the break-up of the country. After having been comprehensively defeated in the 1970 elections by Mujib-ur-Rehman’s Awami League, he did not want to wait another five years for a possible turn to rule the country. He seemed to be in a great rush. A united Pakistan was a hurdle in the way of his vile and wicked plan to ascend the citadel of power. So, he started conspiring with the dictator as the vice-president of the country and raised the slogan of “udher tum, idhar hum” (you rule there, we’ll rule here) which simply meant that Mujib would rule what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and Bhutto would rule what was then West Pakistan, now Pakistan. He is also on record to have greeted the launch of military operation in the (former) East Pakistan with the words of “Pakistan has been saved”.
In spite of that, he was absolutely unwilling to take any chances. So, when the Polish resolution was introduced in the Security Council which, at least, would have provided a safe exit for Pakistani troops and other personnel stationed in the former East Pakistan, he, in a dramatic display of histrionics, tore it into shreds and walked out, thus accelerating the process toward the final break-up of the country and providing him an opportunity to rule over what would be left of Pakistan.
Bhutto was also responsible for stirring the initial outbreak of resistance in Balochistan when he, unilaterally and undemocratically, dismissed the government in the province to be replaced with governor’s rule. The state is still busy battling this upsurge of resistance.
Then was the turn of Zia who plunged the country into the Afghan Jihad and forced the state to wear the apparel of insufferable religiosity which it still has not been able to cast off and, in all probability, will not do so in the foreseeable future. He exposed the country’s Western border to intrusive destabilisation which, since then, has been exploited by our enemies, within and outside, to the detriment of Pakistan and its strategic interests.
He encouraged seminaries to indoctrinate people at an impressionable age and injected in them the zeal to pick up arms in preference to employing the faculties of reason and logic. He inflicted a lot of ancillary damage on a hapless state from which it has still not been able to fully recover. As a matter of fact, the plunge into religiosity continues unabated.
After the stints encompassing the megalomaniac lust for power of Bhutto and the rapid accentuation of religiosity of General Zia came the phase of incorrigible corruption introduced by the Sharif dynasty. Being business people, they were used to the exchange of cash as a bargaining chip for success. They were not shy of using the same trick to consolidate their hold on power. Thus, from nowhere, they were not only hoisted in the seat of power in the early 1980s, they went on to lord over the country for a good part of the next over three decades. While members of the Sharif dynasty were busy minting money through misuse of their public offices, they introduced the scourge of corruption among their associates and the ordinary people who took to the malady as their right to partake of the loot.
In the process, they violated every rule contained in the statute book and created a disgusting culture where money was the driving power. People were divided into two broad categories. Those from the beneficiary class were afflicted with corruption of greed where their lust for money was insatiable and they wanted more and more of the booty to dig their poisonous tentacles deeper. The other group comprised people from lower echelons who suffered from corruption of need. They indulged in the scourge to progress, survive or stay above the poverty line. There were few who escaped the clutches of this virus spread with a wicked purpose.
In later times, Bhutto was succeeded by Asif Zardari who took corruption a step further than even the Sharifs. Then Gen Pervez Musharraf plunged us into a war that we needed to stay away from. Further destruction was heaped upon the country, rendering it vulnerable before forces which were intrinsically inimical to its strategic interests. So, Pakistan waded through a phase of terrorism and destabilisation– a phase that it continues to struggle through.
The story of Pakistan can be congested into an affliction administered by a combination of lust for power, deeply dug-in religiosity and incorrigible corruption. This has weakened the country to a point of excessive vulnerability. The real tragedy is that people who have been fed on false promises and fictional hopes through generations are still unable to make out the truth from fabrication.
They continue to cherish the hope that the Bhutto/Zardari and Sharif clans would extricate them from the clutches of despair and despondency they are buried under. One can only pity such people who become a burden for the country they inhabit!
