Tunnel without light

AUGUST 2002 - Understandably, most of us are not shouting deliriously ‘happy independence day’ slogans from the rooftops of our country on our 55th year of existence. There is little to cheer and much to mourn about. Independence day is not a day of introspection for the Pakistanis because they have largely lost the capacity to think like that. Only editorials and last year’s speeches and ‘messages’ are churned out systematically to keep up the façade. In a day or so, all of that is forgotten as well and disquieting thoughts if any, are shelved for the next year.

It could only happen in the subcontinent when you come to think of it. One can’t speak for the confusion of this day where the Indians are concerned, but we have a bit of a situation on our hands here. For 54 years we have been celebrating ‘independence day’ on August 14 only to now discover that actually it is not the 14th but the 15th!! It is not even our independence day because you become independent after you gain freedom from another country. Pakistan never gained that freedom because it was not a country till after midnight on the 14th August leading into the 15th August. Since India gained freedom from the British, they have an independence day. All we have is a birthday. And since we can’t celebrate ours on the 15th (that being the bad Indians’), we are left with the wrong day! Is there no end to our run of bad luck? It is very embarrassing to consider that all these years we have been celebrating the wrong day; no wonder our morale is down each year this day comes by and everyone gets up and performs the same thing they did last year and with the same bored, half-dead expression. So what are we to do? Should we call the whole thing off and issue a clarification – this is a country that runs on clarifications and ordinances, so another one won’t cause too much tossing and turning. Should we ask the army to solve this problem since from flood relief to foreign policy they know it all? Should we simply ignore it, turn over and carry on listlessly? Who knows? Nobody I suppose. This is a country of questions not answers. But we can all understand why we look cross eyed most of the time. We don’t even know if it’s our birthday or independence and to confound it even further, is it even the right day. Gosh, golly and shucks are three words that come to mind. So to all of you, who celebrated the ‘day’ on 14th August, think about it this way – you made another mistake.

Of course, most would say, what difference does it make? The speeches of whoever is in power are unfailing boring and repetitive. Other than mad bikers out on the roads creating more chaos and hazards, there is not much to celebrate. In these dank and still days, flags find it hard to flutter and while we may have attained independence (let’s keep calling it that), there is every reason to believe that we have absolutely no independence of any kind – other than our determination to self-annihilate ourselves. To a nation already lost somewhere out there at sea, comes more cheerful news that we have attained a new level in poverty. From 20 million good Pakistanis rotting in the poverty cesspool in 1989, the number had risen to 50 million in 1999. The rate of poverty – an astounding 9.6 per cent per annum, three and a half times the rate of increase in population. As we speak, the ranks of the poverty-infected must have topped the 60 million mark. The wonderful thing is that this was the period where Ms Bhutto and Mr. Sharif traded places in the musical chairs game they played with our country, each more inept than the other, each more corrupt than the other and each more hypocritical and insincere than the other. But read Ms Bhutto’s statements and you want to cry in anguish. Here is this woman whose heart bleeds for Pakistan and here is this man, who only wants to come back and serve his people – both will do it with slogans, pocket all the goodies and leave their country in a worse condition than they found it – then run away, make deals, impose self-exile, live in luxury abroad and keep crying for the country. These two are the great hopes for Pakistan, particularly the 60 million who neither have bread, water, shelter or hope.

The army’s hands are now even more tainted than the politicians. Having run the abattoir directly, longer than their civilian counterparts and indirectly for most of the 55 years we have been around, they can no longer place the blame on the others. The army is the biggest political party in the country, the largest business house and more armed than the dreaded Al-Qaeda a hundred times over. But they have never been the solution to Pakistan’s growing problems. Putting a Maj-Gen in charge of a university is not necessarily going to improve the university. In fact such thinking, which forms the mission statement of all who have taken power here, is as disastrous a base as placing a Vice Chancellor in charge of a brigade and hope that things will go nice and easy. It is wrong in theory and it is disastrous in practice, but then who is listening? With all its proposed changes and mutations poised to become part of Pakistan’s new reality come October 2002, more ill will follow and we will teeter on the brink of oblivion, swaying precariously at the edge, as other nations move so far ahead that they can no longer be seen.

The 90s have been bad for Pakistan – slowdown in GDP growth, heavy borrowing, piling debts, inefficiency and corruption sky rocketing, inability to harness our considerable resources and losing track of the global march forward, crackpot policies, rampant nuclear juvenile delinquency syndrome, ill-planned ventures and military adventures – and these are just a few of the many, many reasons for our plight, have naturally led to where the truth stares us in the faces of 60 million of our brothers and sisters who have no hope in hell ever of recovering or leading a half way decent existence. So what will happen? They will die of disease, neglect and lack of basic facilities while we will all go on doing whatever we do, mouthing all the proper clichés but not meaning one single syllable. When there is such stark difference between what we preach and what we practice, what else can happen other than what is written right across the land?

In the end, it is not a question of figures or statistics because we are not dealing with numbers – although you could have had me fooled – at the end of the line, are people, just like you and me but that’s where the similarity stops. We are another Pakistan and they are another Pakistan. Look around you – not at the silly illuminations that don’t light up the dark night of our collective soul, but at the dispossessed and the disadvantaged. Leave the boulevards and the motorways and travel no more than 10 kilometers into your country and see the great bounty of the great freedom that brought you into existence 55 years ago. Who is going to change Pakistan? My feeling is, only an earthquake. The men and women who have ruled and continue to rule us, are dead inside, alive only to their ambitions. Happy Birthday.