WHEN the expression “alternative facts” was famously used a few

years ago by Kellyanne Conway, a senior aide of President Donald

Trump, it created an uproar in the American media. But it also
encapsulated a disturbing and increasingly familiar phenomenon
— the political tendency by some leaders and their followers to
invent their own ‘reality’ and then project this to the public.

Read: Politics of polarisation

The intense debate triggered in the US and beyond frequently recalled George
Orwell’s satirical novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which he had coined the
phrase “Newspeak” for language aimed to limit thought in his imaginary
totalitarian state. Widespread discussion and a spate of books followed on the
concept of a post-truth era, whose distinguishing features are seen to be the
denial of objective reality, where fake news becomes the weapon of political
choice and emotion takes primacy over evidence. Rejection of science and
expertise are also considered its characteristics, as well as conspiracy theories.

This has not been an academic discussion but an effort to also describe and
understand the behaviour of certain types of political leaders, especially
authoritarian ones, and their followers who knowingly purvey misleading
information to people and often start believing in it themselves. As a writer
put it in The Guardian, “playing fast and loose with the truth has moved from
fiction to real life”. As a result, he argued, “Truth is losing its value as society’s
reserve currency, and legitimate skepticism is yielding place to pernicious
relativism.”

As a political phenomenon this is very different from the effort to project rosy
or exaggerated pictures of policy and actions which governments everywhere
resort to routinely. Spin too has long been common but it is different from
‘post-truth’ conduct.

A disturbing trend is the tendency by some leaders and

their followers to invent their own ‘reality’.
This is also related to another phenomenon that can be called the politics of
delusion being witnessed in many parts of the world, including in our own
region. Delusion is commonly defined as an “idiosyncratic belief or impression
that is maintained despite being contradicted by reality”. In political life it is
closely associated with egoistical right-wing populist leaders who use
delusionary narratives to attract the public and build a larger-than-life image
of themselves and their achievements. This is most tellingly epitomized by
Trump. But delusionary behaviour goes beyond him and leaders like him. It
has also come to pervade sections of society in many parts of the world.

What has contributed to the rise of the politics of delusion? Several factors of
which four, mainly overlapping ones, seem significant.

The obvious first one is technology and the proliferation of information

platforms through which messages can be disseminated and accessed. This
makes numerous avenues, where few standards are maintained, easily
available to spread information, non-fact-based narratives and falsehoods too.
The social media especially offers leaders and people the means to say what
they want, with no check on their statement’s veracity. It provides the means
to select what already aligns with their views and listen only to what they want
to hear. This confines them to an information bubble, screening out views
dissimilar from theirs. As there are no consequences of making false claims
this reinforces delusionary political behaviour — and provides the vehicle to
push like-minded people into the same state. The greater use of social media
by today’s populist leaders demonstrates how delusionary narratives are so
easily spread and believed.

A second factor is extreme partisanship that characterises the stance of such

political leaders and their politics. This induces the proclivity to build their
own image in ways disconnected to reality in order to sharply distinguish
themselves from their opponents. The kind of partisanship on display across
the world — in the US, Brazil and in Pakistan too — is unprecedented in many
ways. Partisan behaviour is of course not new. But in its extreme form, in
which all ‘others’ are painted as venal, incompetent and even traitorous, it is
different for it engenders delusionary politics. This is because those practising
it also craft make-believe narratives about their own competence, claim
imaginary achievements and assert untruths about their feats — all of which
fail the test of reality. This inspires their supporters to echo the same messages
and enlarges the space for delusionary politics.

Thus, extreme partisanship drives a ‘compulsion’ to create an alternate

‘reality’. For example, claims are often made by some leaders that they are
taking a particular action for the first time in their country’s history or that no
one has ever governed better than them. While such declarations are belied by
facts, they are accepted unquestioningly by followers who breezily repeat
them.

The third factor has to do with the contemporary environment in which

governance has become more demanding as the world is moving much faster
than the ability of governments to deliver. The expectation gap that is
spawned, given a more informed citizenry, is addressed by such populist
leaders with soaring rhetoric and claims of exceptionalism as well as constant
attacks on opponents to show that only they are uniquely fit to govern. Again,
this leads them into a delusionary state as they increasingly come to believe in
their own propaganda and are blindsided to on-ground realities.

The fourth factor — a cause and consequence of delusionary politics — is the

rejection and denigration of experts and expertise. As populist leaders often
claim to be know-all about everything, informed advice is readily dispensed
with, especially as such counsel punctures their delusionary bubble. Expertise
is rejected not least because it limits freedom of action and exposes misleading
narratives to reality checks. Just as facts are screened out so are experts with
leaders willing to listen only to those who reinforce their views.

This phenomenon poses obvious dangers to nations across the world

especially as increasing sections of society begin to descend into a delusionary
state. If truth becomes so fungible and there is a growing inability to
distinguish between fiction and reality, this pattern, if unchecked, could have
far-reaching consequences. It can plunge nations into uncharted territory by
increasing polarization, eroding trust in public institutions and delegitimising
the political process and democracy. Ultimately it could make countries more
ungovernable.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2020

COLONIAL masters created powerful allies by bestowing upon

them large tracts of lands in various parts of the subcontinent in
exchange for their unconditional loyalty and services in times of
peace and war. This elitist and unjust practice was later continued
in Pakistan with much zeal and gusto, making it virtually a right for
all those who had some influence over or stake in state affairs,
though it’s moot if the state receives loyalty and service, in real
terms, from the recipients of state lands.

Historically, the greater chunks of precious lands have been awarded to

powerful elites — politicians, civil and military bureaucrats, judges,
journalists, capitalists, feudals, developers, etc — leaving little provision for
the poor and landless. No wonder, then, that one fifth of our population has no
proprietary rights or shelter, despite the fact that it’s these people who have
been loyally rendering services in all economic spheres — agriculture,
industry, construction, transport, mining, fishing and so on. These landless
masses have been disentitled from public lands only because they lack a
political organisation or legislative representation to assert their fundamental
rights against the interests of well-entrenched propertied classes and rent-
seekers.

The most appalling effects of this elitist land policy are manifest in Karachi, a
metropolis whose lands have become an odious object of rapacious scramble
by corrupt politicians, corporate interests, powerful institutions, compromised
administrators, collusive regulators and politico-ethnic mafias. Indeed, the
city’s plight presents a symbiotic nexus between the unjust enrichment of
these powerful actors and the city’s unchecked, unplanned and ungovernable
expansion. It has become more robust in the wake of the state authorities’
half-done operation: retrieving the city from a violent meltdown, but leaving
its fundamental structural, administrative and regulatory problems unfixed.
The city continues to suffer from many a malaise:

Master plan: Perhaps nowhere in the world is a city expanding so quickly

(horizontally, vertically and demographically) without a master plan. Karachi
has none. The plan conceived during the Musharraf era and sanctioned by the
Supreme Court never saw the light of day, mainly due to resistance by multiple
jurisdictions, KMC, cantonments, Lyari and Malir development authorities,
the Board of Revenue, etc. Each had its own conflicting land policy and
implementation machinery. None wished to fall under one overarching
authority to bring the disparate divisions into an orderly whole. As a result,
administrative chaos persists.

Great chunks of public land have been awarded to the

elites, leaving little provision for the poor.
Regulation: Notwithstanding Karachi’s plethora of authorities and
regulations, the city has been developed less in accordance with law and more
in the interests of powerful developers. For instance, it is routine to see zonal
regulations being ‘softened’ to convert large swathes of residential areas into
commercial zones, disturbing and straining already scarce ecological
resources. In fact, hanging the zoning regulations/area standards has been the
surest way of making billions of rupees. The beneficiaries are builders,
politicians, bureaucrats and sometimes even criminal facilitators, but the cost
of tampering with the physical capacity, zonal density and urban aesthetics is
paid heavily by the city — a ‘living’ organism — when it loses its natural habitat
for breathing, living and growing.
Infrastructure: Among Karachi’s many woes is the continuous disarray and
disfiguring of its physical infrastructure. Under the nose of its multitier
administration — provincial, local, cantonment, regulatory agencies, etc —
powerful mafias continue to encroach upon lands meant for public amenities:
parks, graveyards, schools, clinics, etc. Appallingly, additional storeys are
illegally added to buildings constructed on small plots in narrow lanes and
congested areas. These fragile structures not only imperil their residents but
also create obstructions for rescue and municipal operations.

In fact, seasonal urban flooding, which plays havoc with roads and low-lying
areas during the monsoon, is largely caused by the illegal encroachment on the
KMC nullahs. Encroachments block access to heavy machinery required to
dredge these nullahs. In 2018, on the recommendation of the Water
Commission, the Supreme Court directed the authorities to remove
encroachments from 30 large nullahs that drain most of the city’s effluent. The
order was never implemented as the commission stood disbanded. The federal
government has now asked the National Disaster Management Authority and
the armed forces to help clear the clogged nullahs in Karachi, which is a
statutory duty of the city and provincial governments.

Borders: Since the city’s land has become scarce, large corporate and
institutional builders are pushing its boundaries north and eastward. DHA
City and Bahria Town have already developed their respective mega projects
over thousands of acres of land along the strategic Super Highway/M9. But
their thirst for land is not quenched. Recently, both have separately acquired
large tracts of public lands for ‘future use’.

Similarly, thousands of acres of public land have been allotted to developers

and investors under the umbrella of Zulfiqarabad — a city to be developed in
district Thatta. But given all the secrecy, we don’t know whether or not these
public lands have been allotted to DHA, Bahria or others through a mandatory
public auction. Even if codal formalities have been met, the land
aggrandisement in the guise of high-end development by powerful interests is
not justified on moral grounds, given the fact that more than half the city’s
population lives in katchi abadis. Moreover, the excessive grant of public land
to powerful developers and elites will have disastrous consequences —
promoting inequality and injustice, displacing local communities, disturbing
demographic balance thereby breeding political and ethnic conflicts, and
more.

Therefore, it is time the elitist exaggeration of land is stopped. Let the landless
and shelterless have a piece of land, which is their historical right.
WE have all lost an object that is precious to us irrespective of its
material value. Despite the stress, somehow, we are not
despondent because deep down we know it will be found. What
drives this confidence? It is the knowledge that no one you do not
trust entered the house since you last saw the lost object and it is
just a matter of time before it will turn up in some nook or cranny.

Alas! The same cannot be said about the homeland. Untrustworthy characters
keep showing up, some overstay their visas; others, it seems do not even
require one. They can come, stay here for years on end with families in tow till
some other unsavoury characters gatecrash to ‘exterminate’ them as their
bosses watch the entire drama on large screens in some war room thousands
of miles away. Still other shady characters enact scenes from third-rate movies
complete with a car chase and a shootout snuffing out ‘dispensable’ local lives,
while the foreign spy aka contractor is ‘extracted’ from the ‘live situation’ by
some foreign mission’s minions.

Ever wonder how fellow citizens keep disappearing in broad daylight? Some
are fortunate to return after a few hours or days with a warning to mend their
ways. Some, like Tahir Khan Dawar, a high-ranking police official from
Peshawar never return alive. He went missing in Islamabad in October 2018
and his dead body was found in Nangarhar province of Afghanistan in
November that year. In countless other instances, the disappearance is sudden
and final; no body, no burial, no final closure for the families. Many such
families continue to hold protest marches from one corner of the country to
another or observe hunger strikes outside press clubs.

One wonders how it is possible to abduct someone from Lahore, Multan or

Islamabad without being caught on thousands of CCTV cameras installed as
part of the much-touted safe city projects. Similarly, what about the hundreds
of security check posts, pickets, and roadblocks that dot the land end to end?
How come no one is ever rescued because some ‘dim-witted’ law-enforcement
official could not recognise the telltale signs of blackened windows and
insisted on inspecting the vehicle, notwithstanding the burqa-clad ‘lady’
sandwiched between the men on the rear seat? Or do these particular vehicles
ply at times when all security staff are asleep? But that never happens to you,
does it? Many among you have surely had your breath checked by the most
sophisticated breathalyser this side of Atlantic, ie the sniffing policeman, at all
sorts of ungodly hours.

Is no one blowing up the images to get a closer look at the

faces?
Coming back to the cameras and leaving aside the safe city network for the
moment, when journalist Matiullah Jan was recently abducted from outside
the school where his wife teaches, the school CCTV cameras recorded the
entire episode. Is no one blowing up the images to get a closer look at the
faces? Would not Nadra be able to match the perpetrators’ faces with pictures
in its data collection? Would Islamabad Police not get sketches made by
specialists based on the school footage and then announce a sizeable reward
for information regarding the abductors? Or is it that all of this is academic
and everyone knows who has done it and would rather let sleeping dogs lie?

Matiullah is a regular guy; former prime minister Yousuf Gilani’s son Ali
Haider and the slain governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer’s son Shahbaz Taseer
were kidnapped and returned after years of confinement and alleged
payments of ransom and who knows what other guarantees. Their hardships
notwithstanding, these were the lucky ones to have returned alive and they
would very understandably like to keep it that way, hence no appeals for
bringing the culprits to book and no tell-all books, not at least in the near
future.

Punjab is the only province to have created the Safe City Authority and
implemented Nacta’s directives under the National Action Plan that came
about in the aftermath of the Army Public School massacre. Other provinces
including Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the supposedly tech-savvy PTI is
leading the second successive provincial government have been deliberating
the initiative for the past six years. Sindh was at one point held back
reportedly by the security establishment as it did not want a public-private
partnership in such a sensitive area.

The TTP claimed responsibility for killing 149 schoolchildren and their
teachers in the APS attack in December 2014. The TTP spokesperson
Ehsanullah Ehsan who surrendered to Pakistani authorities in February 2017,
conveniently escaped from security establishment’s custody earlier this year. A
well- functioning safe city network, with or without private sector partnership,
would have made his escape inconvenient, or maybe not; the number of
cameras notwithstanding; all it takes is to turn a blind eye.

SAY there’s this couple who have been dating each other for years,
but who have always denied any such relationship despite the fact
that they’re always seen in cosy corners, snuggling away and
whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears. Then they go
ahead and announce their engagement and expect everyone to
react with unfeigned surprise and exclamations of ‘oh my God this
is so unexpected, so bold, so groundbreaking!’
This is pretty much what the Israel-UAE deal is like, given that both countries
have had not-so-secret contacts and cooperation for many years now. This
‘normalisation’ of relations simply formalises the existing ground reality, and
comes as no surprise. In the past few years, we have seen unprecedented
economic and security cooperation between the UAE and Israel, one aspect of
which was the increasing use by the UAE (and also Saudi Arabia and Bahrain)
of the cutting-edge Israeli spyware Pegasus, which can only be sold with
Israeli governmental approval. More recently, the two countries pledged to
collaborate on research and technology to combat Covid-19. These are just two
small examples.

Naturally, any such formal announcement had to include a mention of the

Palestinians, an issue that still resounds with the semi-mythical ‘Arab street’,
and so the UAE has linked this agreement to the ending of annexations by the
Israeli government. This is rightly being considered as a fig leaf to retain some
degree of decency in what is otherwise a fairly naked power play, and one
wonders if the deal would stand cancelled if more annexations do take place or
the next time Israel decides to bombard the Palestinians.

Read: West Bank annexation still ‘on the table’, says Netanyahu

Stranger still is the framing of this as a ‘peace’ deal as these countries were
never at war. In fact, they share a common adversary in the shape of Iran and
it is Iran that is almost certainly the main target of this alliance. That then
means that the UAE deal will likely be followed by similar deals being signed
between Israel and Bahrain, Oman and then perhaps Saudi Arabia, though
there is silence on that front so far and perhaps the UAE has stolen the
initiative from its larger partner here.

The UAE-Israel deal was hardly a surprise.

However, while an eventual formal recognition by Saudi Arabia is not
imminent by any means, it is not off the table either as there has been a
growing thaw for over a decade between Saudi Arabia and Israel, again
spurred by a shared anxiety over Iran’s influence. The kingdom may, in fact,
prefer to keep the relationship informal to avoid serious criticism.

In this dynamic, while lip service will certainly be paid to the Palestinian
cause, it will be a distant concern when compared to the need by the Gulf
states and Saudi Arabia (a goal shared by Israel) to contain and roll back
Iranian influence and — though this is a secondary priority — undercut Turkey
as well. So it is no surprise that the same countries praising the current deal
are the very ones who applauded Donald Trump’s stillborn Israel-Palestine
‘deal of the century’ and the ones who condemned it are also the ones who are
raging against the Israel-UAE deal. Turkey, which maintains relations with
Israel, has been particularly strident.

Also read: Iran, Turkey lash out at UAE over agreement with Israel

Why formalise a de facto alliance at all? One reason is likely increasing

concern about America’s growing withdrawal from Middle Eastern affairs and
the effects of its disinterest in direct interventions in the region. In that
scenario, what becomes of tiny UAE, a country of 10 million in which 9m are
foreigners who cannot be naturalised? Addicted to punching far above its
weight and keen to flex military muscle, ‘little Sparta’ is nonetheless a victim
of demographics and can in no way match its intended rivals (bombing Yemen
doesn’t count) without a solid system of alliances if push does eventually come
to shove.

In a world where the US may not readily march to the defence of Gulf
monarchies, Israel becomes the safest bet, given that close ties with it also
allow for a certain protection when it comes to the vagaries of US domestic
politics. A similar calculation can be made by Saudi Arabia, especially given
how invested they have been in building personal relations with Trump and
his family.

If, as seems increasingly likely, Trump loses the elections a deal with Israel
would provide considerable insurance even if the Biden administration
reverses or moderates Trumps’ ‘maximum pressure’ approach to Iran. With
more such announcements in the pipeline, at least if Jared Kushner is to be
believed, Israel emerges as the biggest winner here, gaining much-needed
legitimacy and regional allies who can help mute criticism of its actions.

As for Trump, he may be hoping that this will gain him some plaudits — and
thus votes — in the upcoming elections but it’s debatable as to how much
importance the average American voter places on foreign affairs. However, it
will likely win him the largely unstinting support of the Israeli lobby and its
affiliates.

The writer is a journalist.