Celebrating the year 2016

As the calendar year comes to a close, there is a narrative about 2016 being a very bad year. Lots of important people died during 2016, and many terrible events took place. As the year ends, there is much sober analysis of just how terrible everything is now. One could argue, of course, that a calendar year is a reasonably random framework through which we view events. Since everyone seems to be doing it, one is compelled to partake. I would argue that we should be very thankful for what 2016 showed us. My ode to 2016:

I am thankful to Almighty Allah, for life, and the chance to live it. The most important aspect of life? Death. Nothing else validates the wonderment and vitality of life as completely and utterly as death. And 2016 gave us the chance to be reminded how sudden, shocking and sad it can be. Friends lost parents, parents lost children, children lost innocence. Death reminded us of how negligence and incompetence can kill just as viciously as intricately plotted terror. Planes dropped to the earth in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Killers stomped around the dead bodies of lawyers and young men in Quetta.

But death is not always a tragedy. Killers were hanged, terrorists were hunted and Pakistan’s policemen, soldiers, spies and contractors ended the lives of hundreds. Many of those that died wished ill upon the people of Pakistan, and most of them actively took part in plans to kill innocent Pakistanis.

As the final full year of legally mandated military courts comes to an end, death reminds us of the need to build a society that does not force young men into lives of murder and mayhem. Death reminds us that due process is the only civilising thing about a society, and the absence of such a process makes us as vulnerable to our own monsters as it does to RAWs, or NDSs, or CIAs. I am thankful to Allah for the varied colours and tones of morbidity in 2016, because from Junaid Jamshed to George Michael, from PIA to military courts, and from random disease to natural causes, life is finite and is certain to end in death. Living fully, with dignity, and trying to ensure the same dignity for others as we want for our children, is important. 2016 was a year that helped reinforce this importance.

I am thankful to Allah for the media, and the Pakistani media in particular. There are ignorant people, misguided people and evil people in every profession, in all countries. Yet there are more idealistic people, principled people, and good people in every profession, in all countries. Ignorance gave us the certitude of a Hillary Clinton win in the US election. Evil gave us deliberate fake stories. But idealism, principles and goodness gave us most of what we know about the world. No leader can escape scrutiny, no institution can evade pressure. Pakistanis are privileged to have a media made up largely of people that are representative of an economic, social and political ethos whose very architecture demands speaking truth to power.

The ignorance and evil of libellous ‘Forwarded as received’ Whatspp messages could not overcome the tensile strength of this architecture in 2016. Where investigators, prosecutors, senators and judges fail, our media does not. We should be thankful for the media, thankful for the various technologies and innovations that power this media, and continue to hold all of this infrastructure to much higher standards than what it currently achieves. We can always be better, and one of the tools that helps us assess just how much further we have to go, is a relatively free and robust media.

I am thankful for Allah for Pakistani democracy. It is easy to get carried away with the sponsored lamentations of corruption and callousness that seem to be the principal characteristics of elected politicians in Pakistan. Yet these elected politicians help sustain a system of rewards and incentives in our society that have a deeply stabilising economic and social impact in a country that was pitiful a victim of 2016 as any other. Elected politicians offer a range of contributions to our society and polity without which the overall, unwritten social contract would collapse. Many contribute patronage and nepotism to our society, which is good only for the beneficiaries and, of course, terrible for systems. Yet many others contribute the hope that such patronage and nepotism may one day be replaced with better predictors of resource allocation than family lineage or proximity to power.

Elected politicians contribute narratives of victimhood based on language, ethnicity and geographic origin. This is deeply distressing for those that have either been lucky enough to never have had to experience being on the wrong side of a language, or ethnicity, or region, or those that have been lucky enough to overcome discrimination. The distress of angry folks matters less than the vulnerability of so many people to such narratives. One must never defend the cheap linguistic or ethnic tactics adopted by many politicians, but one must try to understand how easily they tend to be able to sway the feelings and thoughts of so many in our country. I am thankful to live in a country that is constantly being challenged to be a better version of itself by elected politicians, who so often are part of the problem themselves – but without whom there can be no solution.

I am thankful to Allah for Nawaz Sharif. No other living Pakistani politician has the breadth of experience and depth of support that allows him to rule over Pakistan with the freedom that he enjoys. This freedom has been bestowed upon him by the people of Pakistan. Politicians that rummage through the lost and found bin of Pakistan’s national discourse, searching for something other than people power, are learning that increasingly there is nothing there for them. This is a significant departure from Pakistani political culture of yore, a culture in which Citibanker extraordinaire Shaukat Aziz once won an election for MNA from Tharparkar.

Political capital in Pakistan may continue to be sought in meetings with Corps Commanders and two-star ISI officers, but it won’t be found as readily as it used to be. Nawaz Sharif, warts and all, is one of the biggest reasons why. Of course, this will one day also be the undoing of Sharif himself, but I suspect that his protests at being unseated through a legitimate decision made by the people of Pakistan, will be greeted with much less sympathy than his constant incantations about being victimised by Pakistan’s civil military disequilibrium.

I am thankful to Allah for Imran Khan. No other living politician has the ability to disrupt the freedoms enjoyed by our three-time prime minister than Khan. Khan’s capability to be a shaper of the national discourse is only equalled by his capability to misjudge the national discourse. His mistakes are large and spectacular, but he is larger and more spectacular than his mistakes. This grandness of persona is both the greatest strength and the greater vulnerability of the PTI.

Most of all, I am thankful to Allah for time. The end of 2016 reminds us of the flight of time. It reminds us that there are lessons to be learnt from the time already gone, in preparation of the time to come. There is no guarantee that 2017 will be any better or worse than 2016. The only guarantee is that 2017 will be. The best we can do is to do our best, and enjoin others to do their best too. May God have mercy on us all and guide us and protect us, always.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.