Glitzy projects: the new opium of the masses

Islamabad diary
Every exploitative system needs safety valves, sops to the masses that can keep them happy and distracted. The Caesars provided free bread and circuses, including gladiatorial shows for which the best champions were recruited, and tigers and lions brought from far-off lands.
Muslim kings and emperors were given to throwing gold and silver coins at the crowds on festive occasions. They kept the best for themselves, the richest palaces, the best slaves and concubines. But they threw coins at the populace.
Popes, the most famous of them, were given to living lives of luxury. Some were even known to keep mistresses on the sly. But they bestowed benediction on the masses and provided tickets on payment – the famous sale of indulgences – for salvation in the hereafter.
The communist tsars promised equality and lived lives of privilege themselves. Lenin was austere, more a monk in his habits than anything else: one of his favourite methods of relaxation the study of dictionaries of various languages. Stalin, austere in some ways – his sex life was very discreet – but he indulged himself at the table, his late-night dinners where copious amounts of vodka were drunk running into the small hours of the morning. The Great Helmsman, whose extended rule was a nightmare for his people, used to have the army and air force singing and dance troupes provide him with a regular supply of girl friends. But he spoke the language of egalitarianism.
Arab royalty which buys the best properties in London, Paris, New York and around the shores of Lake Lausanne takes extra care to provide subsidies in various forms for its people. As a hedge against the rising tide of the Arab spring, the late King Abdullah decreed a welfare package of 15 billion dollars for the people of the kingdom.
The Islamabad-Lahore Motorway may make for questionable economics – I have yet to hear anything about its economic benefits – but it is an excellent political statement. Ever since it was built the present ruling dispensation has brandished it as an emblem of its competence and achievement.
Can anyone in his right mind say that the socio-economic system in Pakistan is not exploitative? It benefits and works for the greater prosperity of the elite classes – spending priorities and the allocation of money all geared to work for their advantage. But you build a metro in Lahore and another one in Rawalpindi-Islamabad and on their strength you can recite Habib Jalib for the next 10-15 years. Meanwhile your private businesses – sugar mills, poultry business, investment in Saudi Arabia, real estate in London – flourish like never before.
The new leadership ideal in Asia and East Asia is not just to be rich but to be mega-rich. Chinese leaders – so many of them – are into big money. Malaysian leaders are rich, Thai leaders – remember Shinawatra? – are rich, the Burmese generals are rich, and Turkey’s rulers have close ties to big business. Pakistan’s rulers are playing in the same big league.
But you have to hand it to them that they know the language of populism. Even as there is no letup in their endless drive towards self-enrichment, they have the sense to lay out projects which appeal to the masses. The metros will ease the plight of many commuters in Lahore and Rawalpindi. But they will also facilitate the further ruination of public education and the further impoverishment of public hospitals. For no one will ask any questions.
And the two Pakistans will continue to co-exist – the one for the rich and the other for the luckless souls, born on the wrong side of the tracks, who constitute the vast majority. These are two separate universes, the divide between them never sharper or more glaring. You don’t have to travel into the interior of Balochistan to get a taste of this distinction. You can get it right in the heart of Lahore – if only on a hot summer’s afternoon you first take time out to visit the swimming pool at the Royal Palm or my favourite watering hole, the Gymkhana Club, and then if you drive along the canal to witness that extended swimming pool of the masses.
The water is not of the best, its colour a deep brown, but look at the adventurous spirits – only boys, no girls please, we are Pakistanis – who dive into those waters and make a picnic of it. They make up the other Pakistan, the one existing on the other side of the tracks. Anywhere else, the waters of the canal would be cleaned up. The Ravi, or what’s left of it, would be cleaned up too. Not here because these things affect only the wrong side of Pakistan.
This government has already lived out two years of its term. Loadshedding it is managing better than the PPP…something to its credit. But what else has it to show for itself? Two metros and perhaps when the curtains come down on its term another in Multan. Maybe, a few more power houses, and some work on the Gwadar-Kashgar corridor. In the language of the beauty salon, these would count as cosmetic changes.
The Fortress of Islam, however, needs something more drastic – a real shaking up, so that there is genuine reform in health and education – affordable healthcare, a uniform system of education, one examination for all, the same textbooks but with a better understanding of history.
More than equality this is a question of efficiency. Can we hope to forge ahead as a country if universal literacy is not the norm and where the workforce is only half-educated? In Singapore, South Korea, China – every effort at development began with education. This is not a priority with us at all because those at the top of the heap have their own schools and colleges and what happens to the bread-and-circus classes concerns them not at all.
Russia and Cuba should be our models in education. Tell this to our professors or what passes for our economic managers and they will either react with disbelief or hit the ceiling.
Sheikh Zayed Avenues and signal-free corridors, which seem to mesmerise our rulers, are suited to a different milieu, to that of the oil-rich kingdoms or sheikhdoms. More power to them. We are a different country, our problems are different. We were so well placed and could have done so much. Why were we left behind? What accounts for our backwardness, not just physical but mental and emotional? Why do we still find ourselves stuck in arcane questions touching religion and ideology?
The central tenets of Islam are only two, just two and nothing more: let no one go hungry to bed, this is the first Islamic commandment. And the second is: seek knowledge and be not ignorant. Marry the two and faith is complete. The corollary is: seek salvation in this world by feeding the hungry, be it man, woman, child or dog and ass. And dispel the darkness of ignorance and spread the light of knowledge. This will amount to salvation in this world and will beget salvation in the next. Do right here and the keys of the kingdom of heaven shall be granted unto thee.
The three men of the modern era who have enhanced our understanding of the world are 1) Marx who made us see history in a clearer light; 2) Freud who gave us to understand that there is more to mind than the surface impression of things; and 3) Einstein who unlocked the magic of the stars and catapulted our understanding into regions hitherto unknown and unexplored. At the pearly gates shall they not be the first to gain admittance?
What about Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin? Will not the angels stand in extended line to bid him welcome? And Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Hafiz and Khayyam, Mir and Ghalib, and the creators of all that divine noise, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, yes Schumann too and Richard Strauss? Shall they not be the elect of paradise?
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com