Fortress Islamic Republic

Islamabad diary
From old habit some of us keep beating the drums of national renewal. We have become prescription artists – this should happen, that should be done, this reform needs to be undertaken. Can anything be drearier than this? Kids get tired of nagging, scolding parent who are always telling them what to do.
We’ve been trying to fix Pakistan since its birth, not so much by doing anything but by constantly talking, constantly doling out prescriptions. Who was it who first coined the phrase, guftar kay ghazi? That’s what we are and the results are before us.
If someone were to ask us to recount our achievements what would we say? We could more easily point to the things we’ve destroyed, like the railways. But what have we actually created? The Minar-e-Pakistan? Wasn’t it Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who said it looked like a phallic symbol? He could have added that it looked like a bad phallic symbol. The Eiffel Tower has the same shape but look at the one and then look at the other.
Bhutto also said that Wapda House and the Al-Falah complex which stand on either side of the Punjab Assembly building – built in 1935 and designed by Basil M Sullivan, consulting architect to the government of Punjab, as a quick Google search tells me – did not fit into that setting and had ruined it. It’s true because they are such eyesores. If they could have been kept as garden spaces the effect would have been splendid. But that’s asking for too much. We have an eye for such disasters.
The funny thing is we hail the Timurids as our ancestors. Is there anything Timurid about our aesthetic endeavours? The Mughals were great planters of trees and laid magnificent gardens, forerunners of paradise. We can’t see a tree standing without wishing to cut it down. Would the Mughals have done to Lahore what in the name of development is being done to it?
In front of the assembly building, on the left corner of Charing Cross, is the old Masonic Temple, built in the Palladian style. Opposite to it, on the other side of the road was the Shah Din building in much the same style. Now the Temple is in the use of the Punjab government and for security purposes a wall has been erected inside its outer iron railing. As can be imagined, the effect is altogether ugly.
But enough of this…what’s the use of all this crying? A small group of activists – Lahore Bachao Teheeik – went to the courts to try to stop work on the senseless expansion of part of the Lahore Canal Road and on the Jail Road signal-free corridor. The Lahore High Court took a bold decision and found in favour of the activists. But the Supreme Court overturned this verdict. Now the cranes are working overtime, day and night. Gulberg’s Main Boulevard stands destroyed for all time. Trees have been ruthlessly cut down; cement is being poured. This is our idea of development and no one is going to change it.
So let’s move on to other things. Pakistan would have been a better place without its ideologues, those who went about asking what Pakistan’s purpose was and who are still lost in this debate six decades later. Countries aspire to greatness…that’s a common desire. But they don’t keep racking their souls with the question: what was the divine purpose of our existence?
I often wonder why Maulana Maudoodi had to come to Pakistan. He opposed the creation of Pakistan and his home was in India. Why couldn’t he have stayed in heathen India where greater and more useful work awaited him?
Pakistan was created on the basis of Muslim separatism – that as a separate nation we deserved a separate homeland. If anything else was in question our Muslim-ness was the one thing beyond question.
But our ideologues were not satisfied. They wanted to make the hapless people of this country better Muslims. Maulana Maudoodi wanted to convert Pakistan to his purer version of Islam. The framers of the Objectives Resolution could not find time to frame a constitution for the new state. But they plunged headlong into the vortex of ideology to describe for the nation the lofty aim of its creation.
Gen Zia came up with his own Islamisation, the TTP with its purer version of Islam, now the Islamic State or Daesh with something still more refined and distilled.
I was reading the other day of Elon Musk, Silicon Valley billionaire many times over, who is now into the making of electric cars. He is transfixed by two ideas: a) to make solar power so cheap and so abundantly available that mankind moves away from its dependence on fossil fuels; and b) fly a manned mission to Mars in a few years time. He has already launched the first private sector-produced rockets into space. So he is not a man to be taken lightly.
This I was reading over the Eid holidays and it depressed me. Because the contrast between what people out there – in milieus at a distance from us – are thinking and the kind of absurd, mindboggling things we are obsessed with defies understanding. Those countries, those races, those civilisations are so far ahead of us and we are so deeply trapped in our backwardness that it fuels a despair almost cosmic in its breadth and intensity.
There was a picture in the papers yesterday of our prime minister talking to Bill Gates in New York. One can only admire Bill Gates’ patience – for what would our PM have been saying to him? And let’s not forget that our PM is leader of a country which can’t make up its mind about YouTube. Not that YouTube stands for salvation and everlasting bliss. But it’s deeply symbolic, showing the things we are caught in and where the world is going.
Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change – on what we are doing to destroy our planet, our wasteful ways and the huge gap between rich and poor – should be compulsory reading in all our schools and colleges. In school assemblies it should be read aloud – only problem of course being that the entire range of our holy fathers will lose no time denouncing this practice and declaring another ‘jihad’. And the Islamic Republic will have another mortal crisis on its hands.
Climate change is a fact of life, although there are people in the west, especially the land of hope and glory, who can’t bring themselves to accept this. Just as there continue to be Americans who think Barack Obama is a closet Muslim and he wasn’t born in the US, there are Americans who look upon this Pope as a communist. In Pakistan, however, even as more incontrovertible proofs of climate change become part of the public discourse, we are not only embracing coal-fired power plants but actually celebrating this development.
In its race to development China has done colossal damage to its environment. The air in its big cities – Beijing, Shanghai – is un-breathable. Now as the awareness grows that something must be done about this, China is finally trying to move away from coal-based projects…whereas we in Pakistan, always behind the times, are going towards them.
Can’t we think for ourselves? For years, nay decades, we swallowed American prescriptions of development. Americans did our economic thinking for us. When they moved on and clasped new prescriptions, we changed seasons and coats with them. Now it’s the Chinese whose word is the gospel truth.
The Chinese are our friends, as the Americans were our friends and still are. But each country looks out for itself. And imperial paymasters are not into the business of philanthropy. We need energy, yes, but we should be able to do our own thinking how to get there.
And there’s no changing the bottom line: the world is out there and we are way behind.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com