the fear of the unknown – so badly needs? Luminaries bearded and unbearded, bloodshot eyes fixed on the honey pot of power, putting together alliances likely and unlikely...that’s all we are getting when we could do with some poetry and the music of Wagner. No, given the hugeness of our discontents, nothing less than Wagner would do. If not chariots out of the Rhine, why not chariots out of the Indus to set it on fire?
Are our mountain peaks less imposing than the Bavarian Alps? Is the Indus of lesser majesty than the Rhine or the Danube? Why then should the poetry and music of our anguish be less heart-moving (heart-stopping) than the music of Wagner? Let some of those battle-sounds come to our assistance. Maybe they help quicken the national pulse, and in this dull arena we could do with some of that.
To repeat, a feast for the gods is what we need and what we are getting from both sides of the aisle is stale porridge, whose taste has been with us for as long as our dull palates can remember.
We can suspend disbelief and hope for the best – the last refuge of the mentally-challenged – but do we really think that out of this stale porridge we can get something to lessen the sum of our national distress? There’s no harm in being optimistic. There’s no law against perpetual stupidity. But there comes a time when one must pause and ponder.
How did Einstein define insanity? “...doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” With the bilateral dictatorship of mediocrity we have been performing the same experiment for the last 30 years and, defying common sense, we continue to live in hope. We are about to perform the same experiment in the coming elections and yet are hoping for different results. For such naïveté even the great Hakim Luqman would have no cure.
There’s only one hope and a faint one at that. In the run-up to the 1970 elections few certified pundits foresaw Bhutto’s victory in West Pakistan. Punjab, where Bhutto scored his biggest win, was expected to fall to the Council Muslim League headed by Mian Mumtaz Daultana. Gen Yahya Khan’s intelligence apparatus was betting on a hung National Assembly. His intelligence chiefs funneled money to the Muslim League-Qayyum and, predictably, the Jamaat-e-Islami. (Barring Ayub why have all our strongmen loved the Jamaat?)
But the outcome shattered those fond hopes. When the results started being announced on television on the evening and night of December 7, 1970, it seemed as if the earth was shaking, precisely because the outcome was so unexpected. Bhutto had made an impact, very true, but that in Punjab and interior Sindh he would sweep everything before him was not what most of the punditocracy was expecting.
Might something of the same sort happen this time as well? Is something cooking under the surface? Other things are secondary. This is the most vital question about these elections: not the expected happening in the form of one or the other dish of stale porridge winning the culinary prize, but of the unexpected, the least foreseen, coming to pass.
Is there anything to support this conclusion? Not much except a very slender circumstance: to all appearances the two established parties look to be the likely winners but isn’t it strange that they are producing so little enthusiasm? Even their committed fellow-travellers are going through the motions, performing their various duties but showing themselves so singularly devoid of genuine emotion, much less any kind of passion. An election set to define Pakistan’s future, which will tell us whether there is any point in hoping or we should give up on hope altogether, and drawing so little excitement.
There should be storm and thunder on the stage, the sharp clash of ideas, oratory to touch the lustre of the stars and what we are getting is this battle of the porridges. Pakistan is in peril, the economy askew and the forces of extremism on the march, these forces hostile to the very idea of Pakistan. The Pakistani amphitheatre being made ready for something dramatic, either cataclysmic or life-saving, and all that we have by way of a cast is, Allah be praised, this array of shining paladins.
The bell is about to toll for this National Assembly and, for all the good it has done, not a moment too soon. Then we enter the twilight zone of interim government and the elections. Who can tell what destiny has in store for us? Maybe more of the same but maybe our luck turns and the heavens shed a kindlier light on us. But a kindlier light while the same humbug plutocrats are around, shedding tears, oh such tears, for the plight of that figure of speech called the common man? Those who work the lights of heaven would have to be more gullible than we think.
The status quo is what has brought us to where we are. Some movement then, a whack on the backside of the status quo...this is the chance coming with these elections. Will they deliver such a whack? For the sake of Pakistan and its future something of the sort better happen or we are undone. Five more years of the same porridge ladled out by the same clammy hands...we would have to be pretty down on our luck for this to happen.
For this would mean that the gods truly have abandoned us, leaving us to our devices, and the delights of the high table at which we have been supping for the last 30 years, the cooks not changing, the menu not changing, all in the name of the greater glory of this republic we never tire of proclaiming as God’s supreme gift to mankind.
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