Alright…after the metros, now what?

Islamabad diary
The damn thing has been built, at colossal expense and less than colossal benefit, but never mind. They had their minds on nothing else and they had to show something by way of achievement. So just as in an era gone by the motorway was the rage, all the business of government subordinated to its building, the last two years were devoted to this white elephant.
And the Khadim-e-Aala – he of the sasti roti, the tandoors, the Daanish schools, the Aashiyana housing scheme – is pumping it for all it is worth. The motorway was supposed to lead to Asian tigerhood. Now it is the metro that’s supposed to put us in that league. That’s the claim being made for it, and no one is in the least embarrassed making it.
Great…the thing is over and done with, even if it is going to take a bout of higher mathematics to figure out how to get from one side of the Blue Area to the other. How do you walk across this eighth wonder of the world? Again never mind. The metro will help many commuters, and it will be a joyride for others. Business at some of the shopping malls will pick up…and what are 40 or 50 or 60 billion rupees between friends? Two things we will never know – our nuclear budget and the money spent on the metros.
A solid waste disposal system for Islamabad the Beautiful, meanwhile, can wait. As can government schools and hospitals which stopped being matters of concern for us a long time ago.
But another problem looms. Now that the metro is done, what’s the next big item on the menu? Governments have to look busy. For the last two years as Islamabad was torn up, and trees were uprooted – the uprooting of trees one of our favourite national pastimes, indeed a standing tree a red rag for any full-blooded Pakistani – the government had a handy alibi: it was building the metro. Now what?
There was the rail line to Murree and Muzaffarabad. Whatever’s become of that? There was the burning desire to bore a hole through the Margallas and found a new Islamabad on the other side of the hills. We haven’t heard about this lemon for some time. There was the Malik Riaz-inspired dream of a Sheikh Zayed Avenue from Zero Point in Islamabad to Rewat. As far as anyone can tell, the plan is still there.
In Lahore the motorway craze continues in the form of the Jail Road signal-free corridor, the expansion of the Canal Road, and that mother of all loony projects, an expressway from Gulberg to the Saggian Bridge on the motorway, zooming over Lahore’s skyline.
This is a realm of the imagination for psychologists to explore. Just as a child is enamoured of its toys, the present ruling set is crazy about its motorways and expressways. Other aspects of governance are just too boring. Police reform, the criminal justice system, tax reform, expanding the education base, improving public education, raising healthcare standards – talk about these and the eyes glaze over and the mind wanders. A vacant, bored expression comes to sit on the countenance.
Babus – the subcontinental word for bureaucrats – know how to play their bosses. Touching just the right chords, there will be some whizz kid talking of a signal-free corridor, some other genius talking of a rail link across the mountains, and yet another one talking of another metro, and listless eyes will come alive at once, and beatific expressions will spread across bored faces. Everything else will be dumped as the new fad is taken up with all the fervour of a new creed.
These guys thrive on movement – physical movement. Mental concentration is too taxing. That’s why you just can’t get them to concentrate on anything remotely resembling an abstract idea.
But that’s the way it is. The political arena cannot manufacture wizards and heroes on demand. It can only throw up the choices that are available. And it’s our luck that what’s available is what we are experiencing. As far as Punjab is concerned – the powerhouse of Pakistani politics – there’s them and there’s Imran Khan’s PTI.
We can shuffle the cards as many times as we like but we are stuck with the implications of this choice. From one side we can only get signal-free corridors and metros and motorways. You can stand these knights against a wall and point guns at their heads but even in the last throes of their agony the only sounds coming from their lips will be about metros and motorways.
Two years from now they will still be singing the same theme. Or we can expect slight variations to take in the Kashgar-Gwadar corridor. But the corridor too is rail links and motorways. So the basic music will remain the same.
As far as the great alternative, the PTI, is concerned, it has yet to give proof of any passion beyond the subject of election stealing. This may have had resonance once but now it is an old chestnut, losing all zing and inspiration. A new story line the PTI has yet to discover.
The really important issues – Waziristan, terrorism, Karachi – are being handled by the army. This too is the way it is. The political class should have been in the lead, setting the direction and showing the way. But it is the army taking the major decisions…the army which is setting the national agenda. The federal government finds it difficult to get even NGOs right. One day an NGO is proscribed; next day the restriction is lifted. No one is the wiser…either about the earlier decision or the later retraction.
True to form, the interior minister, with his all too serious mien, provides comic relief, blowing hot and cold and then making himself invisible. And he is supposed to be amongst the best in this lot… which makes one shudder.
A distinction has to be made. The army hasn’t forcibly occupied political space. It has come to hold ground ceded by civilian incapacity. If the federal government can’t go beyond fancy expressways and signal-free corridors, and canal bank expansions, someone else will start thinking about Fata, terrorism and Karachi.
It was the same army commanded by Musharraf and later Kayani, and it wasn’t everyone’s favourite institution. Indeed, throwing brickbats at the army had become another national pastime. Musharraf was around for too long and people had become weary of his face. Kayani enjoyed popular approval during his first three years when he led the army into Swat and later South Waziristan. But his extension did him little good. As he sat twiddling his thumbs about North Waziristan, the feeling grew that he too had been around for too long.
The army’s standing with the public now – except, it must be said, in Balochistan where the game is entirely different – is because of its gung-ho approach against extremism…our local Daeshs and the like. The past is forgotten as this present role, the sacrifices of jawans and officers, sticks in the popular imagination.
The army’s outsized role makes for an uneven cart, one wheel bigger than the other. We could do with more civilian dash and daring. This remains one of our major problems – the limitations of the political class, its metro fixations.
Am I the only one to notice how dull our newspapers have become? Television news I stopped watching some time ago…and talk-shows, may the gods preserve anyone concerned about his sanity from them. Perhaps this dullness is for the good, as a mark of stability, the fever having been drained from our body politic by the dharnas and their anti-climactic end last year.
But we are an emotional people, inclined to declamation and mushairas, to songs well written and well sung. Who will fill this void? Who will bring back the poetry to our politics?
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com