Moment of truth

What do we mean when we say it is time to save the country? Can countries die? The identity of a state might be perishable, but its territory isn’t. While you could have been a Pakistani for 64 years only, your ethnic identity is much older. So why have we descended into a pall of gloom? Is it the worry that Pakistan’s territorial boundaries are not sustainable and that the country might end up being redivided into smaller units? Or is it the fearful realisation that we might have become a country and a society unable to sustain civilised human existence that is eating us up from within? There has been a strong sovereignty movement in Québec. But it has neither resulted in an exodus from the province nor led people to wonder if Canada is a failed state. Afghanistan, on the contrary, is a different story. It has not been the threat of territorial divisions that has resulted in mass flight of Afghans over the last few decades, but the realisation that Afghanistan was no longer a place for decent human beings to live in.
It is never the territory of the country that needs to be saved, but the security, dignity and honour of its people, their intrinsic sense of fairness, their integrity as human beings and their pride in their shared national identity. With these attributes intact, territorial subdivisions are almost always voluntary and never perceived as the death of a country. There is a growing sense across Pakistan that the state is neither providing security nor a judicious system of governance to the citizens, and the society is failing in its ability to develop collective norms capable of protecting the virtue, decency, integrity and liberty of individual citizens. This acute sense of failure entangled with a sense of helplessness is not palatable and provokes varied responses. Many remain in a state of denial, craft conspiracy theories and blame hidden hands for our shameful state. There are some who have accepted our future as a predatory society and have either joined the predators or decided to leave. A majority is aghast or in a state of acute depression. And there are others who are just very angry.
In 1969 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross described the discrete emotions people experience while coping with grief and tragedy in her book “On death and dying”. This process of dealing with catastrophic personal loss – initially applied to people suffering terminal illness and later extended to other sources of anguish – has come to be known as ‘the five stages of grief’. These five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Kubler-Ross noted that not everyone encounters all five stages or experiences them in a certain chronological order. A cursory glance at our society suggests that most adult Pakistanis are grieving the failure of their state and their society and can be identified with one of the five stages. There are some sorrows in life that are inescapable, such as the loss of a loved one. It is human inability in the face of such reality that helps one move from anger and depression to acceptance.
But unless one is convinced that ethnic history or genetic makeup trumps human will, ability and intelligence, the state of helplessness in the face of deprivation, injustice and adversity does not culminate easily into accepting avoidable anguish but brings anger to a boil. The belief that Pakistan is their only hope for a better future lies in the continuing refusal of ordinary citizens to acquiesce in the ugliness of our state or accept that they are disempowered and helpless, and thus incapable of resisting tyranny or precipitating change. This refusal is reflected in the anger and outrage provoked by violence, depravity and injustice whether it emanates from Islamabad, Karachi or Fata. But the only problem with anger as a lever of change is that it is not a sustainable state. One cannot stay angry and constructive for an extended period. Had Kubler-Ross written about stages of grief experienced by groups as opposed to individuals, would she have replaced acceptance with resignation as the end-stage?
The Zulfiqar Mirza-MQM brawl is a blessing in disguise for it is bringing out in the open the ugliness of our power elites, our state and our society for everyone to see. The savage killings across Pakistan are shaking people out of apathy and denial, and there is an emerging consensus that patronage of violence by state agencies or any party, group or faction in the name of national security, ethnicity, religion or any other ideology is unacceptable. The ignorance-is-bliss crowd and those caught with their pants down might be united in blaming the media for holding up the mirror and portraying a reality that is causing collective depression. But a majority still views the media as a constructive actor. But how long will we stay angry before we get used to violence, crime and corruption in our midst? There can only be two possible responses to a society’s continuous exposure to revolting events: it takes corrective steps to prevent them from happening; or it lowers its ethical standards and norms to a level where they don’t seem unsavoury anymore.
In a constitutional democracy the desirability of an entire set of fundamental rights (for example the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, right to information etc) and the institutional frameworks designed to uphold these rights is premised on the belief that disclosure of information and knowledge of facts leads to corrective action. The utility of the media lies in its function of informing people about the hidden truth. The role of the judiciary is crucial because it holds people accountable for their acts and omissions on the basis of verifiable facts. The rule of law is vital for it defines the code of acceptable conduct for the citizens and the state and censures those who contravene it. But is the evolution of a free media or an independent judiciary an end in itself or the means to an end? What if public revelation of crime, cruelty, extortion and inequity neither produces legal sanctions for the wrongdoers nor social condemnation? What if a society becomes such that even blaring disclosure of crimes produces no consequences for the culpable?
There have been startling disclosures by PPP’s former home minister in Sindh about MQM’s patronage of violence and crime in Karachi. And yet we hear that the MQM and the PPP are ready and willing to jump in bed once again without any scrutiny or investigation into the allegations made. It is now common knowledge that all political parties functional in Karachi have established militant wings and the escalating violence is a product of feuds over their respective share of political power as well as the spoils of the underworld. But there are no traces of any acknowledgment within our political parties that there is urgent need to outlaw use of violence and patronage of crime as acceptable political tools. What options are we left with? Is an army operation a sensible option, especially in view of the army’s dismal record of self-accountability in the aftermath of the GHQ attack and the Abbottabad and Saleem Shahzad incidents?
There is malfeasance in every society. But that reality exists along with a political and social compact that whoever is caught stealing, lying or cheating will be punished. Unless it is as clear as daylight that affixation of individual responsibility will be an automatic and natural consequence of breaking the law there will be no correction in the state of our brutish existence. What we need to save the soul of Pakistan is the hardest change of all: a change in our individual and collective behaviour.

Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu