A journey around Jinnah

For a column that is published on December 25, the birth anniversary of the Quaid is an easy peg. It also serves the purpose of looking before and after in a nationalistic context and, to borrow the poet’s idiom, pine for what is not.

In any case, there is this ritualistic drill we perform in a perfunctory manner and there is some lament about the Quaid’s vision that we have lost.

Another thought that would appear to be subversive is whether this vision is still relevant in a world that has changed over and over again since 1947 – significantly in that fateful year of 1971. The observance of December 16 as a day to remember has been reinforced by the massacre of our schoolchildren by terrorists in Peshawar two years ago.

But this is particularly the season that awakens memories – and expectations. There are intimations of celebration and joy in a global context. The holiday season around Christmas is blending with the excitement of the New Year. Our sense of how time passes and what it does to us becomes more acute.

For us, December brings its additional baggage of memories. As if December 16 were not enough of a trauma to live with, we have December 27 – on Tuesday – to commemorate the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The ominous return of Asif Ali Zardari to Pakistan on Friday, marked also by a raid by the Rangers on the offices in Karachi of his close associate, also prompts a review of the post-Benazir wanderings of the PPP.

The mood at this time is generally melancholy and meditative. However, there is something different this year. We are bidding farewell to 2016. How terrible this year has been is confirmed by the electoral victory of Donald Trump in the US. Harsh winds of hate and aggressive nationalism are blowing across the globe. And this has also encouraged a deep awareness of history, with references to the 1930s when fascism was on the rise in Europe.

Incidentally, Dictionary Merriam-Webster has named ‘surreal’ as its word of the year. The lexicographer selected the word – which means unbelievable and fantastic – after spikes in searches following terrorist attacks and the US election. It joins Oxford Dictionary’s ‘post-truth’ and Dictionary.com’s ‘xenophobia’ as the top words of 2016.

What word should Pakistan pick to describe its experience of 2016? Perhaps ‘Panama’ would serve the purpose, with its focus on corruption. Looking for a word to describe the feelings of the people is very much like the selection of the person of the year, a practice that is associated with some media houses. For instance, Time magazine has chosen Trump as the president-elect of “the Divided States of America”.

For that matter, the monthly Herald has included the name of Mushtaq Raisani in its candidates for the choice of the Person of the Year. We should be reminded of who this person is and why he is put in the company of, say, Gen (r) Raheel Sharif. He is the former finance secretary of Balochistan and more than Rs730 million in cash were recovered from his house in Quetta.

You would recall the visual images of that raid, with bundles of high-value currency notes scattered about. Raisani was once again in the news this week when the National Accountability Bureau announced a plea bargain agreement with him and a co-accused. They will pay Rs3 billion and the case will be closed. Of course, the cash haul was in addition to the properties and assets that he had been amassed.

The Supreme Court has questioned the powers of plea bargaining that NAB has exercised to release those involved in corruption after a portion of the money they have stolen is recovered from them. But how should justice be served in a system that is so thoroughly corrupt? The pity of it is that one knows about people – politicians, bureaucrats and business tycoons – who have amassed incredible wealth through unlawful means and nothing whatsoever happens to them.

Can this change in the present situation, when the reality of what we have made of Pakistan is becoming more and more unbearable? At one level, our society has been ravaged by the militants and the extremists, though there has been some action on this front. But our capacity to deal with any challenge to our survival is woefully diminished by the corruption that has infected our system.

In these circumstances, the example set by Mohammad Ali Jinnah as a politician should be a valid point of reference. I believe that more than what we think his vision for Pakistan was, we should be looking at the life he lived and the values that he invested in his politics. Yes, there are many surprises in how events led to the creation of Pakistan and some realities would tend to negate the slogans that are officially raised in this country.

Anniversaries can be more than a thoughtlessly performed ritual. They may incite serious thoughts about our encounters with history and about our sense of direction. This is that time of the year that particularly arouses emotional reflections in a subjective manner. Every such opportunity suggests the need to make a new beginning after looking at the past in light of our present predicaments.

It was only incidental that I was able to share this week some deeply felt interpretations of Partition by a group of bright students at the Habib University. On Thursday, I was able to attend some sessions of a conference that summed up a course designed by writer and critic Asif Farrukhi to study Partition as reflected in fiction, cinema and the performing arts. The conference was titled ‘Reading the Partition: Critical Perspectives’.

It may be a revelation for some of us, but the fact is that we are still living the partition of India even when it has nearly receded from living memory. How else will you understand the passion with which this group of young girls and boys, removed from the actual event by two generations, delved into the pain and estrangements of a tragedy that touched millions of lives. It is a burden that the minorities on both sides of the divide bear almost every day.

During some innovative presentations of the students, I wished that our rulers are able to understand these feelings. But aren’t the privileged students of social sciences a tiny island in a turbulent sea of extremism and irrational animosities?

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com