Our Second Skin

JANUARY 2004 - Events here so often remind me of the poor Sardar Jee who couldn’t use the loo on the train and was hardly able to hold back the flood, while everyone else did without fear or hindrance. Rules in Pakistan are made for the stupid Sardar Jees and those naive enough to believe in them. For the rest, there are no rules. There never were. Now the deluge mightier than ever before is upon us. Lawlessness is the only law that operates here.

From dawn to midnight, we all break rules with impunity. The higher we climb on the greasy status pole, the more our penchant for doing exactly what we wish to do. The powerful and well connected think nothing of regulations. It is understood that whatever these petty impediments may be, they should not, cannot and will not be allowed to stand in the way of doing whatever it is that the powerful wish to do. Thus, traffic rules, are broken at will by the highest in the land and only a few stories find their way into the press now. Men of the judiciary abhor anyone implementing the law. Should someone be so foolish as to stop them say for over speeding, they slap contempts on the duty-conscious idiot. No army officer now is ready to be held accountable for anything. Those that run into them pay very heavy prices that usually include severe beating, jail sentences and verbal abuse. The Military Police is used freely to assault civilians. It is not just the Generals and their Lady Generals who believe they descended from another planet far superior to this one, but even Captains and Majors think nothing of assaulting and putting behind bars their counterparts from civilian life. Very few of these cases find their way into the press because even the press is reluctant to take them on, but as and when these do, the results are predictably the same. The guilty party is exonerated with honour and the innocents are put through the wringer. There is no facet of life where one can claim that the rule of law exists. Under this obnoxious cloud most people live out their lives steering clear of authority and its misusers. The disease has spread far and wide. AIDS, SARS or Avian Flu is nothing compared to this deadly strain.

Following rules is a zero sum game. There isn’t even any inner satisfaction that you have done the right thing and adhered to your principles. Instead, this belief in the supremacy of the law becomes a cross that people bear and pay for heavily, in terms of time, money and aggravation. A simple signature on a tacky form may take months and innumerable trips to some petty and loathsome clerk who will extract his pound of flesh – and this being a meat eating land, just a pound won’t do. Victims end up paying enormous amounts of money just to follow the rules. Thus, companies which pay their taxes and keep their noses out of shady enterprises and double book-keeping end up paying hefty bribes to the tax people simply to secure their approval, having done nothing shady to start with. On the contrary, those who maintain no books or dodgy ones at best pay nothing and part with trifling amounts to cover huge gaps in their accounts. It is hard to reconcile with the extortion that is part of everyday life here.

Large-scale construction continues all across Pakistan without approved plans. What plans that are ‘approved’ are at best a joke. Those who are unable to be part of the palm-greasing club and the accompanying circle of fraud and deceit, fork out huge sums of money for permissions that should have come in due course of time through normal means. In other words, follow the rules and pay a heavy price as well. No wonder then that more and more people prefer to break the rules as this route has the least hassles and no fallouts. This pernicious system of extortion is now like a second skin that covers all people. There is hardly a case where people are allowed to have what is theirs without someone putting them through severe mental torture and depriving them of their hard earned income. So common is graft and corruption that invariably all Pakistanis sniff with amazing ease, the ‘right’ route to get the work done. By bitter experience and common knowledge they all understand that the system works no other way and paying the ‘jagga tax’ is the only way forward.

Last week, a lady – who in one breath recounted the names of her friends among which ranked the Chief Minister, the Chief Secretary and the Education Minister, clamoured with great dignity that her daughter be allowed to take an examination as a regular student of a college since the only thing that was preventing this from happening was her continued absence from classes, failing in the send ups and lastly cheating twice in the college exams and being caught both times. The lady seriously believed that these were hardly valid grounds for disallowing her daughter to take the examination, adding that it was no crime if she had cheated twice, since it was ‘only’ a college exam and in any case so many students cheated all the time. She regretted the fact that her daughter had been ‘singled out.’ There was of course a time when society would shun and ostracise socially those who had shady characters and dubious backgrounds. Such fine distinctions find no room in the new Pakistan. Here, the bigger the crook you are, the more you are in demand socially. From the mightiest in the land to the most servile official, all will be seen supping at your table, posing with your family and trading asides as close and intimate friends do. There is no longer any need to maintain even the semblance of a line that was clear and distinct at one time but now is blurred beyond recognition.

A friend to have a portion of his house renovated made the mistake of doing it by the book, only to find that while the entire neighbourhood had violated the bye laws on a scale that would have made King Kong look like a midget, the authorities having sanctioned happily all that illegal building, were now transformed into paragons of virtue and strict enforcers of the same laws. After trudging through offices and offices, filling in countless forms and innumerable visits to an army of petty officials, he still paid a hefty fee to ensure that his case was ‘entertained’ and then thrice as much to get his papers ‘regularised.’ It seemed the good officials had unearthed miles of rules, regulations and laws stretching back to the time of the British at the turn of this century which all had to be observed in the right spirit and to the last letter. Having endured all that, the icing on the cake appeared when he learnt that even his property having been in the family for over 80 years still had some important ‘items’ missing and these were then ‘regularised’ for a sum of money that ran into thousands.

Which is why the presence of a Punjab Minister in the FATA areas (another national aberration that we have to live with) to buy an illegal vehicle – apparently the family trades in this lucrative line of luxury vehicles of dubious parentage, comes as no surprise and neither does his disappearance. After more than three weeks of shuffling and mumbling, the man in question has disappeared just as easily as vehicles do in those areas. It is now well established that this trading is popular with all the top politicos of the land who buy, sell and tool about town with ill-gotten luxury vehicles that are just as ill gotten as their wealth and status in society. But then this is the way it goes and it will never change, certainly not in our lifetimes. As and when the Minister returns, he will neither be chucked out, he certainly won’t resign that being the honourable thing and therefore irrelevant. Instead, he will probably receive a sympathetic pat on the back and a round of dinners on his safe return. The CM will undoubtedly attend.