29 December 2014

BOTH TROUBLED AND TROUBLESOME

29 December 2014 

Pakistan is a state in perpetual turmoil. Call it a failed one or a nation fighting demons from within, the hard reality is that neither Islamabad nor Rawalpindi will find relief unless both stop patronising and arming terror groups

In its stature, Pakistan lacks the attributes essential for a nation. As a modern state too, it has hardly evolved beyond the pointers fed by its Western-educated elite or military despots. Thus, systemic insensitivity has been firmly grounded there since its existential quest made South Asia a hotbed of violence. Although there are people who have a longing to dislodge this state of affairs to taste normalcy, that has remained a pipe dream.

The recent attack by the Pakistani Taliban on a military school in Peshawar that killed over 142 people (mostly school children), has out-classed the barbaric worst. Hence, it shall not be any longer about the trusted playboy-cricketer turned Imran Khan or puppet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s romantic notions about the good and bad Taliban. The world has its reckoning; The Taliban are one, and its believers can shoot kids at point-blank range and burn books — in their efforts to give humanity an unsustainable jolt.

While a mourning majority in Pakistan was genuinely in grief after a pack of savage Taliban attackers shamed humanity in Peshawar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a Lashkar-e-Tayyeba terrorist charged in 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was given bail by a lower court in no time. Although he remains behind bars on technicality, it is only a matter of time before he walks free.

This shows the way of life in a country, where a MA Jinnah too was forgotten during his lifetime — albeit in a personified form, his portrait still hang on the walls of representative Government offices of the land he forcefully shaped as a country. Then, he won with his fragile ego that was in straight confrontation with Jawaharlal Nehru and the prospect of free and united India, where he could have just a nonchalant position.

So, he dreamt for the future of a new country with millions of flaws to be never repaired. Jinnah was a shrewd legal mind, but he committed a blunder by giving passage to fundamentalist elements in mainstream politics. The processes kept maligning with successions of dynastic/feudal//arrogant democratic leaderships and in its counter — replacements by Islamic military dictators. In that long stretch of mockery drill, Pakistan lost a chance to give the basic traction to ‘real democracy’, standing round the corner. Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote couplets for his homeland, Iqbal Bano gave her mesmerising voice to those verses with pain and dismay — and ironically, these all were taking place years after Pakistan was made a country on the line of religion, to pacify the elite of the Muslim community. There was no culture of consensus then, and things have hardly changed now — the common masses continuing on the fringe.

The ideological grounds were rather artificially created and made sharper with underlyings of ‘hate India’ campaigns — the added poisons came at the height of the Cold War, when the US found in Pakistan a dumping ground to park its highly mechanised arms to counter the might of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Central Asia, and in Afghanistan particularly. The Pakistani state fell prey to the American might, and it also pursued a ‘double-game theory’ by receiving the easy petro-currency from the Gulf to the ‘Arabisation’ of an strategic terrain of South Asia.

The culture of intolerance stays unrelenting and there is no sign that the country is tempting to do a course-correction by embracing the practical procedures of parliamentary democracy. Even though the people at large are disenchanted by the unproductive violence inside Pakistan, there is no reason to believe that a deepening crisis that should worry all, has in fact any chances to redeem in the coming years, when both at bilateral and multilateral forums, Pakistan does diplomacy to keep the minimum show going on.

Saadat Hasan Manto relied on the finest sarcasm in his Bombay Stories: “I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty”. It appears that this has been exactly copied by those who came at the helm of affairs in Pakistan and led the country towards degeneration. Today, Pakistan is the worst victim of terrorism — of the same elements that have a history of living in bonhomie with the Government its intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Army.

In the changed strategic culture, Pakistan is much more vulnerable today than ever before — the latest Peshawar attack is a grim reminder. The strike has shown that no place is really invincible in this country. So it’s time the world offers to Pakistan its support to fight that nation’s enemies within. The language and acts of terror hardly know the direction well, and endangering the earth (including Pakistan) in any manner cannot be justified. Amidst these, India has its own share of re-planning to do on its Pakistan policy, by ending the blockade of diplomatic negotiation, and preparing for the worst as the natural recipient of trouble from its north-west. This has been a historical reality, and shying away will not serve any purpose.

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