Learning from the Gospel and something from Lenin

Islamabad diary
Prime Minister Saab has once again taken serious notice of loadshedding in the holy month and has ordered immediate steps to remedy the situation. Half of Ramazan is already over. More than anything declared by PM Saab we should pray for the early onset of the monsoon rains. That more than the exertions of the power secretary, Nargis Sethi, will reduce the nation’s current misery.
Why has the Khadim-e-Aala stopped reciting Jalib? – aise dastoor ko, subah benoor ko mein nahin janta. Could any spectacle be more inspiring than those revolutionary verses on his lips? He would sometimes even take to singing them.
Jalib was no pseudo. He was what he was. If he’d been around he would have said take a cue from Lenin. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, asked by a peasant what communism was, Lenin said, “What is communism? Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.”
What is Islam? Islam in our context should be every child in school, doctors going not to Saudi Arabia – as most of them are – but finding employment and contentment at home, and no loadshedding whatsoever – plus heavier electricity tariffs for places like Defence and Cavalry Ground and subsidised power for poorer localities, the rich paying more, the poor less…and the IMF told to take a hike and get out of the country. And sugar barons and cement dons (cement being the new mafia) not told but squeezed to pay their share of taxes. That would be Islam.
Is the maths too complicated to understand? What affects people more, power cuts or the absence of a flyover along a certain stretch of road? Focus on essentials first then to your heart’s content play with trifles or tilt at windmills. The Taj Mahal is important as is the Palace of Versailles or the Alhambra in Granada. But first things first…taxation and the filling up of the treasury first, the provision of justice and the upkeep of the army second, and then only on to delusions of Mughal grandeur.
Haven’t we had enough of the widening of the Lahore Canal? Pervaiz Elahi tried his hand at it. Khadim-e-Aala, not to be left behind, cut some more trees and added another lane. But there seems to be no end to fooling around with it…and there are plans afoot to tinker some more with this road.
And the Lord alone can save us from another calamity in the making…building a theme park around Jahangir’s tomb and Noor Jahan’s mausoleum. Both these monuments to lost glory have withstood invasions and the elements for the last 400 years. They have been witness to the decline of Mughal power, the spread of anarchy in Punjab, the coming of the Sikhs and then the British conquest. They have suffered them all but remain standing. A theme park – cineplex, car-parking, restaurants – will be the death of them. But nothing less than divine intervention will do. Our present tsars of culture when they get such ideas into their heads are not easily deterred.
It’s really baffling…why are our priorities thus? Is this the way to build political capital? Loadshedding did satya-naas – the destruction – of the PPP. The party will never be able to make a recovery in Punjab. That chapter in its history is over. Another summer of loadshedding and it will be the satya-naas of this lot. Yet they remain fixated on distractions. A motorway or a metro-bus may have worked as political capital in the past. But now holding the nation by the jugular are three things: the power shortage, the Taliban insurgency and foreign debt. These are the problems that need fixing …everything else is secondary.
In the Model Town shooting – dozen dead, scores bullet-wounded – if we accept the version of the Khadim-e-Aala and the provincial government the whole thing becomes scarier than we think. For the stance of the provincial government is that when the Khadim-e-Aala came to know of what was going on in front of the Minhaj-ul-Quran Secretariat he gave orders for the police to ‘disengage’. This was passed down the line, from Dr Tauqir Shah, his principal secretary, to the chief secretary and from him to the police chain of command. This order was repeated a second time after a couple of hours. But the police did not ‘disengage’.
Last year in response to reports that a new anti-terrorist police force was being created police service officers in Lahore came out in virtual revolt against the provincial government. And the Khadim-e-Aala had to backtrack. Of course there was no question of taking action against the revolting officers…the whole thing was covered up, as if nothing had happened.
Now if a provincial mansabdar – and no ordinary mansabdar but reputedly the most powerful and effective in the whole country, and PM Saab’s brother to boot – is thus not truly in command of his own police force, what remains of his justification to remain in the position he occupies? Law and order and public security are the first orders of business of any government, here or in the United States or indeed Mars. And if this is how things are, a supposedly powerful chief minister giving orders to ‘disengage’ and his orders flouted or ignored, then should his first priority be to look into this state of affairs or play more havoc with the Canal Road and build theme parks, Heaven preserve us, around Jahangir’s Tomb?
Pointing out such things is no conspiracy against democracy. Saying that democracy should be invested with more meaning, that it is meaningless without a measure of social justice, is again no conspiracy against democracy.
The British had a form of democracy for a long time – debates in the House of Commons, etc – but their system of elections was more ingenious and rotten than anything that could be dreamt up by a creative member of the Election Commission of Pakistan. So there was a reform movement to remove those evils and it took a long time before things were set right and elections became fairer. Until the late 18th century stealing a chicken was a hanging offence. That was the law. Women got the vote only in the beginning of the 20th century and the National Health Service came into existence only after the Second World War when Attlee’s Labour government came to power.
Social security in Bismarck’s Germany, the Scandinavian model of the welfare state…these were not created overnight. Progressive movements, social democratic parties, agitated for the rights of the working class and the under-privileged and it took a century of struggle before anything was achieved. Do we live on a different planet? Should there be no voices in Pakistan calling for fundamental reform, for the curbing of the power of the rich and more spending on social services? Is Pakistan condemned to have multiple systems of education? Should we close our eyes to class exploitation?
Democracy must survive…who says it shouldn’t? But should this democracy remain a plaything of the privileged classes? Should it remain an instrument for the subjection of the masses? The Tories in Britain, historically, stood for the rights of the privileged. The PML-N and the PPP, despite their expertise in doling out sops to the poor, are parties of big money and big business. To say that this is so and that if Pakistan is to become a better place the political lines must be redrawn…how does this amount to subverting the constitution and derailing democracy?
The birth of the PPP here and Sheikh Mujib’s Six Points in East Pakistan were answers to the political suffocation of the Ayub regime. What we are witnessing is the Thatcherisation of Pakistan – the rich becoming richer, the poor marginalised and distracted by lollipops. Unless as a nation we are bereft of ideas completely, to this there should be some response, some search for alternatives.
And if in good time such a response is forthcoming let not armchair samurai say that democracy is in danger. Democracy is in danger from its guardians, not from those who may be wishing to enlarge its temple.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com