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Happy Birthday, Pakistan
By Humayun Gauhar

Another year, another milestone – “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on the petty pace of time.” Pakistan will be sixty in a couple of days. Or should I start counting from December 17, 1971, the day Jinnah’s Pakistan died and another Pakistan was born? By what name should I call this new one? “Bhutto’s Pakistan”? “Yahya’s Pakistan”? Bhutto called it “New Pakistan”, for we had successfully got rid of the land where the Muslim League was born and the people who had arguably struggled for Pakistan harder than the rest. I have decided to call it “Hamara Pakistan” – “Our Pakistan”. I think this is the most honest, for we are all responsible for what happened to Jinnah’s Pakistan and we are equally responsible – indeed complicit and culpable – for what has happened to Our Pakistan. Where do we stand today? At yet another crossroads – perhaps for the last time. The next few months will decide in which Pakistan will go. One is oblivion. In December 1971 we lost half of Pakistan. Today we are in danger of losing the rest.

Successes there have been many; failures even more – far more. Our greatest success is that we never lost our sense of optimism – even till now. Our greatest failure is that poverty haunts the land – abject, subhuman poverty. There is our nuclear capability to clap about, which we achieved against many odds and despite many hurdles. What goes unsung is that we have been home to the largest number of refugees in the world, not just from Afghanistan but all surrounding countries. We won a cricket world cup and many gold medals in hockey.

We dominated the world of squash for two decades. We have produced some fantastic poets and some great singers. We did something neither Napoleon nor Hitler could do: we defeated the Russians and played a major role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. Even after truncation we are one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with lakes and mighty rivers and a fabled sea. We have deserts, mountains and plains, an incredibly varied flora and fauna, the second-highest mountain and the highest lake in the world. We have incredible natural wealth – all sorts of minerals and natural gas, everything except oil, which perhaps will also be found one day. We have always been self-sufficient in food, thanks largely to Ayub Khan’s dams and the industry of our oppressed peasants. We have the strongest military in the Muslim world. In short God gave us all the wherewithal needed to make a country great. So why, on balance, have we failed? The answer, dear friends, “lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

We have still not decided what we want to be, which is why we have suffered two failed constitutions. All three have claimed (hypocritically) that we are an “Islamic Republic”, yet Islam is nowhere to be seen, only deviance and ritual. We are far removed from the democratic and egalitarian spirit of Islam, which is now at the mercy of de facto clerics and obscurants of all hues. We still don’t know what we are and why we are. We are not agreed on what our creed is. Some want western style electoral democracy, for they genuinely believe that elections one after another will eventually lead to better things. Others wish to hark back to the State of Medina under the Prophet (PBUH). Still others wish to emulate the Afghanistan under the Taliban. We are trapped between liberal extremism and religious extremism, because extremism thrives when all except a lucky few are uneducated and illiterate. Intolerance and hypocrisy have become national traits. Not knowing what we are, we have been yo-yoing between half-democracy-half-dictatorship for 60 years. It is a political-military compact in which each rules by turn. This hypocrisy has led to our biggest and most embarrassing failure – poverty.

Any surprise then that law and good order have broken down. Politicians and political parties have been pushed into the background (no surprise, given their track records) and the political ground has been usurped by others. The organs of the State – the three branches of government – are at odds with each other, encroaching on one another’s domain. The legislature is an embarrassment, a Lucky Irani Circus that does everything but legislate. The executive has regularly run roughshod over the legislature and the judiciary. Extremists have hijacked the pulpit and their beliefs are spreading like a virus. Terrorists stalk the land. The government – more accurately, the executive – stands paralysed, making one blunder after another, groping around blindly. The populace looks on bewildered, agog, aghast. All this for lack of an ideology, a belief system which gives mission, direction and objectives. What we need now is revolution that will overturn this iniquitous order and replace it with an egalitarian one. Survival lies in this alone. To do that, we have to go back to our roots to rediscover our objectives.

The idea of Pakistan was fashioned by Iqbal and most succulently spelt out in his Allahabad address in 1930. He philosophised it in his poetry, until it became a mystical imperative. He tried to reawaken the Muslim from his colonial slumber and make him reclaim his legacy by rediscovering his Self or khudi. He sought to liberate the Muslim mind from the golden shackles of the West and the rusty shackles of the hidebound cleric and re-instil in him the confidence to think for himself, not parrot the thoughts of the colonizer like Macaulay’s ‘Brown Sahib’ does nor like a throwback lost in the irrelevant, hair-splitting obscurantist nonsense of the de facto cleric – “How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?” wondered the obscurant, spending years debating this pointless point. Iqbal succeeded to the extent that he reawakened enough of India’s Muslims to enable Pakistan to be made, but sadly we had an immediate relapse as the new country fell into the hands of Brown Sahibs with “black skins; white masks” and feudal politicians, neither of whom had helped in the creation of Pakistan. All we actually achieved was going from the slavery of the White Man to slavery of the Brown Sahib and the White Man’s toadies, the feudal robber barons and tribal warlords. Iqbal’s contempt for such people and his call to revolution is beautifully echoed in his famous poem, Firman-e-Khuda Farishton Say – God’s Command to the Angels. It was originally titled “Ode to Lenin” but was changed because Lenin was a communist unbeliever.

Arise! Awaken the Poor of my world / Shake the citadels of the great.
Set the blood of slaves on fire! / Let the little sparrow engage the dreaded falcon.
As the hour of the kingdom of the poor approaches / Obliterate every vestige and visage of the oppressor.
Burn every single ear of grain from the field / That does not feed the farmer.
What could be clearer than that? Happy Birthday, Pakistan, and may you live forever. Ameen.

Posted by: john frum 2007-08-12
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=195957