Collective Apathy

MARCH 2003 - In a sense, everything is hopeless in Pakistan. In a sense, the problems of this country are so monstrous that nothing less than an epic catastrophe can solve them. And then, in total contradiction to the above, Pakistan’s serious problems are so easily solvable that it makes you cry. We do live in a land of great contradictions. I have received scathing email criticism on ‘Iqbal’s Story,’ published last Sunday, with most writers castigating me for not having done more for Iqbal.

Some said I had no business to send him back to his village because he had come to this great city of Lahore, to make a life for himself and it was not right to send him back from where he had escaped – for assumedly good reasons. I think all who have said things like this are quite correct. I ducked my social responsibility to a member of my society who was dispossessed and disadvantaged in every way, making just a token gesture of help and compassion but not going the extra mile. That thinking surely characterises our collective will where we are happy to be mute, passionless observers of all the travails and tortures and excesses that are committed regularly every day and every night against the weak and the oppressed of our country – but we never say a word or do anything. Deep down, each one of us – or let us be more realistic, those of us who pause and reflect, believe that there is nothing we can do to change anything. We are all burdened and weighed down by the belief that one small step is simply just that. One small step. That the problems are so immense that nothing we do will ever make a difference, that the dice is loaded against those who are not well off and secure like we are and the entire system is designed to oppress the oppressed further. In that context, the Iqbals of Pakistan become an expendable commodity, another number in the large ledger of our collective embarrassment that we keep under tight wraps. In some sense this is not totally incorrect thinking because the system, the great cogs that grind and groan and mark our daily existence, move at a speed and a rhythm that makes it beyond reach and beyond reform. Pitted against that, the puny and small-scale effort to rehabilitate the Iqbals of our land seems to be a hopeless task where defeat is all but inevitable. This thinking has built in us an immunity to the suffering of all those around us and made us a selfish, mean and cruel people who care nothing about anything, intent only on personal gratification and well being of ourselves, our families and those we hold dear.

Why is it that with more than 50 years against our name – and this figure looks dramatically superior to what our top four batsmen average in the farce in South Africa, we have yet to start the long journey of resolving the most basic problems and needs of our people. Does it require the arrival of a man of God to show us the way? Can our travails be solved only by some super human being, a special among specials, a messiah who will guide us and heal us? It seems that all Pakistanis wait for this deliverance and this being life, no one is going to show up. A people deserve the government they get or a government deserves the people it gets – it doesn’t really matter because in the final analysis, who ever has strode into power, has done nothing but continued to exploit the country, its fast-dwindling resources and its people to further personal or party agendas. Fulfilling basic requirements becomes an impossible task when the basics are allowed to go on gathering till the most achievable of goals becomes the most complicated and most difficult tasks that clearly falls far beyond our capabilities. This is why things as basic as water, education, health, sanitation have all fallen by the wayside and the contrast between the way some of us lead our lives and the way the rest do becomes so wide that they, the dispossessed look like aliens from another land, so remote and so far away that we can no longer spot them.

There is some kind of a civilian caboodle that is mis-functioning in various parts of Pakistan; it would be a joke to say that it is functioning. We have yet another Prime Minister who’s most striking achievement to date has been his ill-advised, waste of our money trip to the Middle East while in his home province of Balochistan, warring tribes rocketed Pakistan’s only source of real energy. Instead of rushing back – he should never have gone in the first place, he carried on blithely holding forth on Iraq and telling the world what they should be doing while his backyard rose up in flames and millions of our precious gas reserves went up in smoke. Perfectly built to play Falstaff in a home-version of Shakespeare’s delightful comedy, he looks just as much out of place directing our affairs as a walrus would in a china shop, yet he plods on driven by his own self-importance and the role (roll?) he is playing on the national and international scene. Of the country’s most pressing problems, like jails where Iqbal spent three unhappy months, he has no clue nor does he wish to have a clue about such things. The great Punjab Assembly has spent the better part of January and February deliberating over how many dishes to serve at weddings. This is truly visionary governance as the worthies debated on whether 300 guests comprised a marriage party or not. Who are these jokers? On 7th February, they started late since the quorum was incomplete. So what’s new? What revolutionary thinking and actions can the people of Punjab expect from the rag tag collection of ‘the new Pakistan’ that has placed its heavy butts on the province? What problems will they solve? And when they are gone, who will replace them and what will they solve?

Abuse of that accursed blasphemy law continues. The great commando warrior, the urbane and very suave President Pervez Musharraf had announced in 2002, that the law would be amended to make it less liable for abuse, that no such case would be registered until a senior magistrate had investigated it. When the beards started hollering, the President beat a retreat that was faster than loudmouth Shoaib’s 100 mph useless ball. He never appeared in public with his two dogs so it was also understood that he would not do anything to the blasphemy law either. On a sad Thursday, Mushtaq Zafar, after securing release on bail from the High Court in Lahore, was gunned down and now lies six feet under. He was fighting the selling of narcotics in his locality and that was hurting business, so they fixed the good old blasphemy thing on him, caused him no end of suffering and anxiety and then when the law granted him bail, simply snuffed him out. Mushtaq is not the first or the last victim, but who in this wide world called Pakistan is going to undo this terrible scourge that flourishes amongst us? Pervez Musharraff? Banish the thought. Jamali? Shujaat? The National Assembly? The Supreme Court?

As we all bask in this wonderful light that bathes each spring day and look at the flowers and breathe the temporarily clean, fresh air, we are quite far away from what ails the land. There is no one from among us who can start to take the first few steps towards building a national consensus on things that should matter to us. 10 million people marched around the world on 15th February protesting against the war on Iraq, from Tasmania to Iceland – we stayed home, and made it ‘the largest expression of collective will in human history’ in the words of Jan Pieterse the sociologist. It may not stop Bush but then again, it might just do that.