Islamabad diary
The father of the motorway was Adolf Hitler who gave Germany the autobahn. The autobahn eased motor travel and communication but by itself it did not create German inventiveness, German prowess in science and technology. Those things were already there.
The way we in Pakistan are talking about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor – the network of roads and highways that will be built as part of this project – we are giving the impression as if our destiny is all set to change. The keys to paradise will fall in our hands.
The reasons for Pakistan’s backwardness – for Pakistan’s missing out on the opportunities of its birth – are many and the lack of road or rail links is not the chief amongst them. In the first two decades of our existence the communication networks we had were what we had inherited from the Raj. There were large hinterland spaces where no proper roads existed. In rural areas kutcha or mud roads represented the natural order of things.
Yet Pakistan in so many respects was ahead of most countries in Asia. What bare infrastructure was there functioned smoothly. Administration was better, law and order was better…and trains were there and they ran on time. There were no power shortages and in the Ayubian decade we invested heavily in hydro-electric power projects. Mangla and Tarbela go back to that time.
We started the 1965 war without thinking through the consequences. That ill-conceived adventure derailed Pakistan completely and helped raise the walls of hatred towards India that exist until today. We could not handle the aftermath of the 1970 elections, this being a failure of both the military leadership then in command of the country’s fortunes and the West Pakistani political elite. And, a bit later, we descended into the nightmare of the Afghan ‘jihad’.
The 1965 war militarised the Pakistani mindset – much of our repertory of rousing martial songs date to that conflict. We had problems with India before but that war raised the walls of paranoia higher than ever. The dismemberment of Pakistan as a result of the 1971 war opened the way for Punjab’s unchallenged supremacy over national affairs. Punjab was no Mickey Mouse before. But with East Pakistan gone there was no one left to question or balance Punjab’s peculiar brand of religio-political nationalism, the ideology which became national thinking. The Afghan ‘jihad’ gave us guns, vitriol, hatred, religious extremism and its inevitable offshoot, sectarianism.
Those were transformative occurrences. Without the 1965 war and the Afghan ‘jihad’ a strong case can be made out for the conjectural proposition that Pakistan would be a different place…less prone to muddled adventurism and flights of ‘strategic’ fancy.
Consider another train of speculation. If the Bengalis had been with us would they have gone along with Zia’s coup? Could they have countenanced the so-called Islamisation that became the justification and battle-cry of Zia’s long stay at the helm? Would the Bengalis have gotten as involved in the Afghan ‘jihad’?
But to return to the present, how will the CPEC affect our national thinking? Will all its highways and coal-fired plants make us a more rational people, less inclined to the siren calls of fake religiosity? Will our colleges and universities become true centres of learning, where the stick and hammer of dogma as wielded by such luminaries of understanding as the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba, become less potent? Will the corridor become a new silk road on which come marching armies of learning and enlightenment? Will it give a fillip to the arts and with those highways being laid and those industrial zones emerging will there be a renaissance of knowledge in the arid spaces of the republic?
I ask because with the overnight quadrupling of oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war the resulting bonanza which opened up for the Arab world, that vast resource of never-ending petro-dollars, promised a future more glittering and spectacular than anything envisaged for us by the China-Pak Economic Corridor. Now with the dramatic slump in oil prices that era of unlimited Arab wealth is already drawing to a close. We are seeing it happen before our eyes.
Who could have thought that Saudi Arabia would post an 80 billion dollar budget deficit? But it has because revenues have dramatically fallen. There is a glut of oil around the world and there are no signs that this is going to change any time soon.
What have the oil-rich Arab countries to show for that bonanza? Subsidies and handouts for their citizens, costly infrastructure, highways, cars, luxury hotels, property acquisition in the choicest corners of Europe and America, and costly arms imports to fight wars that will never take place. Apart from the Arab countries, Nigeria has oil and it is broke and amongst the most corruption-ridden countries in the world. Venezuela has oil and it is broke. Dubai was lucky not to have oil. So it had to improvise and create other sources of wealth, in which it has been spectacularly successful not least because its leaders had imagination and foresight.
Oil wealth was supposed to solve all the problems of the Arab world. Listen to the way we are talking about the corridor and the impression being conveyed is that it will solve all our problems. It will open the doors of economic opportunity – at least that’s the hope – but how fully that opportunity is utilised depends on us and, crucially, on how best we undertake the perennially-stalled project of internal reform.
Do we improve education and health and invest more in these sectors? Do we improve police and judicial working? Do we improve tax collection? Do we get serious about corruption in public life? China can’t tell us how to run our country. They have their own system and we have our own way of doing things. We are friends but different peoples with different temperaments. How Pakistan is managed is up to us.
The money coming our way from the first Afghan ‘jihad’ was a minor economic windfall. What did we do with it? What is there to show for it? There was money we got when we signed for sentry duty with the United States post-9/11. Consumer financing got a boost and the mess on our roads, the proliferation of motor cars, is a sign of that. And more roads were built – in Islamabad mostly useless roads – and there is that Pakistan Monument on Shakarparian which is not going to win any Aga Khan prize for architecture in a hurry. What else do we have to show for that grace period?
We profited from the oil boom too, Pakistanis in their tens of thousands seeking employment in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, their remittances helping shore up the national economy. To a large extent the transformation of the rural scene, brick-and-mortar houses replacing mud houses across Pakistan, is a mark of our Gulf connection. Again this is day-to-day consumption. The enduring production of wealth and knowledge, the true yardsticks of progress…we missed out on these.
Visionary and inspired leadership has to come first before fantasies can be fulfilled.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com
