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Tuesday March 19, 2024

Moving a bullock-cart of a nation

Islamabad diary
Unity, faith, discipline...forget the first two: call this a disciplined nation?

By Ayaz Amir
February 08, 2013
Islamabad diary
Unity, faith, discipline...forget the first two: call this a disciplined nation? Put food on the table, say at a marriage feast, and we can’t get that right, scarcely satisfied unless we make monkeys of ourselves. How do we get other things right?
Ask anyone not entirely stupid and on his/her lips will be the mantra of change. How easy this recitation. Traffic on the roads, litter on the streets, the working of government departments, all in a mess. Instead of getting right these basic things, we go for gimmicks and hare-brained shortcuts and think we are moving the moon and the heavens.
Sher Shah Suri’s reforms, and the reforms of Akbar, began with the better management of land revenue. On that was built the edifice of empire – expenses of the army, the darbar and the harem flowing from that pivotal reform.
The PPP cannot tax the feudal class of Sindh. It cannot bring order to Karachi. The PML-N would sooner die than tax the traders of Hall Road and Liberty Market. Whether it is the patwari system or the police, power generation or the road-building departments, we lack the capacity to reform them. Yet we talk of change.
Elections by all means...this is hardly something to question. But when the heat of elections is over, our other tasks will remain: bringing peace to a ravaged and fractured land, improving the economy, etc. Without some gift for capacity and organisation we can forget about tackling these problems.
Not that we are totally bereft of the stuff called dedication. But it is to be found in places that many of us would not approve of. The Taliban are dedicated to their cause, much as so many of us would decry that cause. But their commitment is not to be doubted. It takes fervour of a special kind to storm military installations, the probability of death in such acts outweighing the chances of coming out alive. We can forget about defeating the Taliban if the dedication brought to the task, or what the army can bring to it, is less than that on the other side.
The army has rendered great sacrifices, and the nation should be grateful for this. But why oh why, even at this juncture, when engaged in this mortal combat, does the attraction of commercial enterprises prove so irresistible? Was this the time to get the Punjab government to pass the Rawalpindi Defence Housing Authority Bill? Is this the time to move the Islamabad Defence Housing Authority Bill in the federal parliament?
Defence housing authorities, whatever the fake gloss put on them, are business ventures in which favoured souls turn a neat profit. Reclaiming Pakistan from the pit into which it has fallen requires a different kind of dedication.
The lure of real estate and fighting the Taliban...this equation betrays a contradiction in terms. We know we must come up to the task but our weaknesses hold us back. This reveals a split national personality, not the best state of mind in which to undertake any venture involving risk and pain.
Visiting Muzaffarabad at the time of the 2005 earthquake I remember standing on a slashed hillside – half of the mountain having crashed into the River Neelum – and watching a closely-knit column of men, marching or rather jogging up the incline that stretched below. As they came near I asked out loud who they were and one of the boys, scarcely looking at me, muttered, “Jamaat-ud-Dawa”. They looked tough enough to take part in any cross-border ‘jihad’. I later saw a field hospital just outside the city run by the same outfit, complete with operating table and skilful surgeons, one of them from Indonesia.
Far be it from me to romanticise the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Militancy in Indian Kashmir was never a great idea and it hasn’t done Pakistan any good, or for that matter any good to the people of Kashmir. But whenever I recall that hillside I think of Professor Hafiz Saeed’s well-trained volunteers. We are a lazy nation, let’s admit it. We could do with some of that commitment and organisation, some working of the muscles, a stiffening of the spine...we could do with some of this.
Trouble is deep down the Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a sectarian outfit as are all our other militant organisations. On one platform it is hard to see them coming, just as it is hard to see them shedding any time soon their sectarian colours.
Anyway, much the same thing impressed me about the Tehreek-e-Minhajul Quran rally in Islamabad – superb organisation and a discipline that any army could be proud of. Forget about the professor’s politics and forget for a moment the jibes about his heated container. It is the dedication of his followers, men and women, and young girls too, staying in the open for three or four nights and braving the bitter winter cold, which sticks in the mind.
We did such a thing when we were in the PMA, that being part of our training. Electioneering, whatever sofa luminaries say, is not easy and by now I am a minor veteran of this too. But out in the open at night on Jinnah Avenue...I would rather talk of revolution somewhere where the lights are soft and a glass of the right stuff is close at hand. So if in today’s cynical Pakistan there are still men and women travelling from far-off places who are ready to put themselves out for something they believe in, regardless of whether we approve of the theology or not, one’s admiration is excited...at least the admiration of a jaded soul like mine.
We want to make Pakistan a better place? We want to cut through the corruption and the mayhem? Take in the bad news: it can’t be done without sacrifice and dedication. Even the idealists amongst us are chocolate revolutionaries, armchair samurais (this last a phrase from a Pat Buchanan column). The Urdu phrase is lovely: guftar ke ghazi...warriors of conversation.
Politics is not an easy art. Its practice should lead to some discipline. But our traditional parties, God bless them, are entirely innocent of the charge of organisation. And so set in their ways that they are past any hope of reform. They have the weight of numbers on their side...but power of conviction or breadth of imagination? Perish the thought. The power of conviction lies elsewhere: with the Taliban and other militant organisations, this being one aspect of our current tragedy.
To make the same point another way: Pandit Ravi Shankar trained initially as a dancer and actor. He went to a French Catholic School in Paris and was a member of the dancing troupe put together by his elder brother Uday Shankar. Then, leaving all this behind, he travelled to Maihar (Madhya Pradesh) to be at the feet of his guru, the legendary Ustad Allauddin Khan. “I was allotted,” he writes, “a small house adjacent to where Baba (the Ustad) lived. It was infested with rats and snakes... scary even during the day... At night, the hooting of the owl followed by the howling of (the) wind transformed the landscape into a weird experience. I think it was my sheer willpower that held me back there...It took me almost six months to adjust to this setting which was so alien to the life I had led. I began practicing for hours together...taking lessons on sitar and surbahar...This spanned the first three years of the seven years in Maihar with my Guru.” Seven years, imagine. Only then came the mastery over the sitar, then only the fame and fortune which followed.
Or, as Neruda describes the ‘Education of the Chieftain’:
“He made himself out of taciturn fibres.
He oiled himself like the soul of the olive.
He became glass of transparent hardness.
He studied to be a hurricane wind.
He fought himself until his blood was extinguished.
Only then was he worthy of his people.”
And we think commitment comes easy.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com