A hard country

ONE has to love Pakistan to be able to live in it; mere survival is not the true
measure of one’s patriotism.

For more than 185 million Pakistanis, their patriotism is tested every minute of every
day, tried during the winter months when gas supplies tantalisingly flicker and fade, and
tested during the summer months when electricity flows like an alternating current —
sometimes on, sometimes off.

And every five years — if the electorate is unlucky — they endure the gruelling exercise
of an election in the hope that the next hand of governance they have been dealt will be
better than the last.

If they but knew that the odds against them getting a perfect hand were one in
536,447,737,765,488,782,839,237,440,000, then instead of reaching for a ballot paper,
they might do better by buying a lottery ticket instead. They would almost certainly
stand a better chance of winning.

The state of Pakistan has been like the valiant theoretical physicist Dr Stephen Hawking
— indomitable, a triumph of will over adversity. When Dr Hawking fell victim to the
disease that wasted his body but could not touch his fervid mind, they were many
pessimists around him who doubted whether he could survive for more than three years.
He has lived to celebrate his 70th birthday in January this year.

Similarly, there have been all too many cynics who have regarded Pakistan as a terminal
case, closer to death than to self-fulfilment. Just skim through the titles of books on
Pakistan written by Pakistanis who depend (or depended) on its continuance for their
income and identity: Roedad Khan’s A Dream Gone Sour; Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into
Chaos, Tariq Ali’s Can Pakistan Survive?: The Death of a State; and Sher Baz Khan
Mazari’s Pakistan: A Journey to Disillusionment.

Anatol Lieven’s recent book Pakistan: A Hard Country is in better company. It deserves
to be on the same shelf as Farzana Shaikh’s Making Sense of Pakistan, if only because
neither of them reads like a requiem for a failed state.

Yes, Pakistan is a hard country. It is brittle; it broke into two pieces in 1971. It is rock-
like, impervious to anything but the most gradual change. It is dense; one has only to
conduct a census of its population to prove that. But it is resilient and it is strong.

It is a hard country with a soft centre. And it is still a state — despite the prognosis of
those opinionated pundits who prefer to face television cameras every evening than
reality the morning after.

By the time of the next general elections, assuming that the present government
completes its full term, the bulk of our population — over 65 per cent — will be able to
vote. Too many of them will be too old to gain admission in the 1,202 degree colleges, to
take courses in the 3,125 technical or vocational institutes, or to obtain degrees from the
pitifully few 132 universities.

One dare not mention the subject of adult education. When education at the primary
and secondary level is a dream for countless millions, the prospect of adult education is
a daunting nightmare.

It has been reported somewhere that Dr Stephen Hawking does not believe in an after-
life. He regards heaven for example as a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark”. He
can afford not to. Had he been born in Pakistan, he would have got used to living in the
dark.

In which direction is our country moving? Is it on a gradual but perceptible, upward

trajectory, hoping to be rescued by the ‘youth dividend’? Or is it in a downward spiral,
spinning towards a black hole of self-destructive oblivion? Or is it conforming to its
image of a vast, unmanageable urban sprawl, where almost 50 per cent of the
population lives in towns of 5,000 or more inhabitants? If politics can be said to be an
art, then governance is a science. And the political parties who intend to represent the
120 million or so eligible voters would do well to lighten their rhetoric and to lean more
heavily on the solid crutch of a credible manifesto.

One has only to recall the fate of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar
Qadhafi to realise how they, like many other leaders, have succumbed to hubris, to the
seductive belief that they knew better what the public wanted when the public knew
exactly what they needed. The public does not want an atom of an idea; they expect the
molecule of a policy.

It is not inconceivable that a year from now, the form of government in our country may
not be democratically elected but something akin to the ‘Bangladeshi’ model, with the
judiciary and the military supporting each other, a sceptre with a pen at one end and a
sword at the other.

If so, this would not be the first time we would be imitating Bangladesh. We have
already outstripped them in terms of population. We would soon be outrunning them in
political experimentation.

To those Pakistanis whose lives like my own have not yet ended and those like my
grandchildren whose lives have not yet begun, the future is another country. Should
they choose to live in it, it will in its own way and in its own time test their patriotism, as
mine has over my life-time tested mine