A Long Night’s Odyssey

Fifty-three years have slipped by since Pakistan first appeared on the map of the world as a nation state. Much has happened in those fleeting years and not all of it could be considered as being conducive towards the country’s interests. In those disappearing years, Pakistan was orphaned at its birth when its founding father shuffled off into the pages of history when his mortal coil burned out. His departing legacy was to leave a country caught up in birth pangs deciding its own sense of identity; a question that still needs to be adequately answered today. It saw its eastern half break away from it and declare its own independence. It saw politicians of many shades and hues promising it everything under a crescent moon, but that moon kept being eclipsed by a reality, which kept intruding into our dreams. It had its share of noble leaders with honorable intentions riding on white stallions preaching salvation. If dreams were meant to be broken, then the history of Pakistan has been a dream waiting to be realized.

Fifty-three years later there are a lot of questions with uncertain answers remaining where once there was euphoria and a hope of a new beginning. The generation that carried the banner of Pakistan and heralded its battle cry is slowly passing off into immortality. If all things are considered equal and if water wets and fire burns, then there will be a final day marked by questions and answers. Those that came before us, will one day, ask us, the inheritors of their dreams and sacrifices, what have we done to their dreams. Do we have an answer to this question when it is finally asked of us before the bar of history?

Pakistan is not an ideological or a geographic approximation of a political vision, but it is the tangible product of a million silent souls who offered the ultimate measure of devotion for its attainment. Pakistan is the personification of human sufferings, which toiled for its realization, as they still do, and was never intended to be a personal estate for a few at the cost of the many.

The reality that Pakistan is a nation governed by the few for the betterment of the few is our enduring tragedy. How did we come to this sad state of affairs? Where in our national journey did we take a wrong fork in the road and do we have the option to retrace our steps? There may be an answer to these questions, but with each passing day that entrance; our route of escape, is gradually drifting away from our grasp just as the answer is becoming more elusive. In many ways, the road behind us is longer and fraught with more perils than the road ahead, but if move ahead, as we have been, then we are surely heading towards the precipice of a cliff obscured from our views. This year, which marks our fifty-third birthday, also marks the hundred year of Frederick Nietzsche’s birth. Nietzsche once said that when a person looks into the abyss, the abyss stares back at him and that is when the person discovers his true character. Only time will tell whether this observation is true for us also, because once we reach the edge of the cliff and look into it, will we as a nation find our character or will we as Lemmings walk off it unthinkingly only to plunge to our eventual death?

It is a natural human fragility to assign blame for mistakes. We as a nation have always searched for scapegoats, because of our being prone to this weakness; this inability; this dishonesty, we have become masters at deceiving ourselves and ignoring the truth, as we worship at the alter of the prophets of falsehoods and lies. The accumulative mistakes of the past half a century are too numerous and well recounted and the list of dramatis personae well known in this sordid tale of woe, which has been the rhyme and reason of our despairing performance on the world’s stage. Who do we blame seems to have consumed us as a nation and we are always in a perpetual state of searching for a justification to affix our frustrations as we, like King Lear, “howl, howl, howl” into the winds of misfortune which buffets us from all directions. Some people say that the first step on the road to intellectual honesty is introspection and if that is the case, then we have learned nothing, because unlike Lear we refuse to acknowledge the fact that our misfortune is the result of our own actions.

This refusal to hold ourselves responsible for our own actions and accept the consequences of our misdeeds is an alien concept to us. We, as a nation, have to embrace this concept before it is too late and we end up paying the ultimate price for our refusal to heed the warnings clearly visible on the horizon. We can pretend that we have all the time in the world, but the bitter truth is that time is a commodity, which we are no longer able to afford. For too long we have experimented with idealized utopian schemes and now, much to our chagrin, a time is approaching when we have to decide upon a binary set of hard and astringent choices. Once we had the luxury of choices before to chose and pick from and now, due to our petty venal and intolerant inflexibilities, we are confronted by simple truisms.

What are some of these simple choices confronting us? Are we a democracy or an authoritarian form of government; are we an Islamic nation or are we a secular country; are we for peace or war? Should we look to the future or to the past; should we proclaim or perform; should we facilitate or hinder our own future prospects? Do we want to remember our country as a map in some outdated atlas of the world or not? Are we Pakistanis or Punjabis or Sindhis, or Pathans or Baluchis? Are we Muslims or a number of different religious groupings? Who are we and what do we want to be? Do we wish to dream and make those dreams our masters or should we think and make thoughts our aims; do we have the courage to face the reality and by struggling against all odds, make it more agreeable to our daily existence? Do we still want to succeed without working for that success and do we still want to be rewarded without working for that reward?

Will we still persist in carving a dichotomy between our words and our actions? We claim that that Pakistan is a beautiful country and we urge the world to come and visit us. Will we still rape all those who come to visit us? Is raping our guests a time-honored form of our Islamic hospitality, which we want to show the world? Our appointed, and not elected, ministers never get tired of professing the freedoms available in Pakistan and when we ask for the right to exercise what has been promised to us, we are told not to ask the impossible! We appoint commissions to unearth the truth only to suppress their conclusions and deny the truth while we take refuge in lies. We as a nation are more than willing to blame each other, but we are not willing to help each other better our miserable lives?

When two of our compatriots meet one other on distant shores, they greet each other by asking a simple question, “are you Indian?” and then follow up with a question determining each other’s provincial affinities. In many ways, Pakistan is a semi-autonomous confederation of provinces with a country and not a country with provinces. We judge the worth of our citizens by the clothes they wear; by the car they drive and by the money they waste on trivial pursuits, which are the hallmark of our materialistically greedy and parasitic society. Owning a piece of land in Pakistan is a birth right to a political office and the freedom to rob the nation at will. Our political policies are motivated by personal insecurities and malignant interests at the expense of the national benefit and our politicians’ undying creed is not what they can do for their country, but what their country can do to enrich them beyond their wildest dreams.

Our religion, Islam, preaches that suicide is a sin and yet we commit suicide daily, because we as a nation have substituted sin for honesty. We live in sin, because we cannot afford to live honestly in the land of the pure and home of the righteous. We promise our youths that they will have a future, but we steal that future away from them and deposit it in unmarked offshore accounts. We preach meritocracy only to practice nepotism. We promise reforms only to entrench repression. Every dawn we thank our Benefactor and pray with all our might that it will be not be as worse than what yesterday was. We cling to the past and remember it nostalgically, because the past is unchangeable and we dread the future, because it is uncertain and our lives are crying for a little structured certainty in our politically nomadic travails.

There is word in the German language, Gotterdammerung, which when translated into English means the twilight of the gods. The German composer, Richard Wagner, used it to title one of his operas after it. We, in Pakistan, are presently living in that twilight of the gods, because the present situation cannot last for long. The demi-gods of Pakistan, who have shaped its destiny due to their whims, are watching the sun set on their world, as they know it, for the final time. The situation in Pakistan is awful, but it will get a lot worse before it deteriorates into complete anarchy. Pakistan, in many ways, is where France was in 1789. Like the pre-revolutionary France, there are only two major economics groups in Pakistan: the rich and the poor with a small perpetually shrinking middle class struggling to retain its economic sanity. Then there is the schism in Pakistani society between the conservatives and liberals fighting for the right to claim the soul of Pakistan’s future and who ever wins: rich or poor; conservative or liberal, they will all lose, because the only way they can win is by destroying the everything they claim to love!

There will come a time in Pakistan, as it will one day, when the people will demand their right to live without any more yokes of oppression being levied on them and as the economy will continue to slip into non-existence, and the people will discover that they cannot feed their children who are starving to death; they will demand the right to feed their children. The poor disenfranchised people of Pakistan can bear any inequity with patience that their self-appointed masters can curse them with, but they will never tolerate the sight of their children dying from hunger. When this time comes, as it surely will, the so called faceless monolithic known, in Pakistani parlance, as the masses will assume the shape and the face of a beast of retribution and the only justice they will seek will be based on the simple principle of revenge.

There is no question that Pakistan is poised on the brink of a social, political and a religious revolution and the only question, which remains unanswered, is what shape it will finally take. The first people who will suffer the wrath of the oppressed and the denied will be the educated and the privileged classes of Pakistan. Like the old Latin maxim, which solemnly declares that, “to whom much is given, much is expected from”, the so-called elites of Pakistan will consider themselves lucky if they live through this nightmarish experience. In many ways, the only piece of wisdom that the Pakistani butchers, masquerading as leaders, have shown can be seen in their decision to cut down the old trees in Lahore. If these trees were not allowed be cut down, they would be one day the final gallows for the oppressors of the Pakistani people!

Then justice will be meted out to all those who had a share in the sustaining of the oppression and injustices and in telling lies and breaking promises and the final accountability will be a piece of rope and a shallow grave for most of us. Those who stood by silently while the Rape of Pakistan was unfolding before their eyes are guilty also and will not escape the final verdict of justice. All of us are guilty and all of us will be punished, and we better be ready to hear the judgment against us, because it will be merciless. Do we a final choice in this matter? Yes, we do and it is: suicide or the hangman’s noose, because either way justice has to be served!

Like William Shakespeare’s Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, we can not continually tell the sad stories of kings and rulers and their demise, because the time for talking and promising is over as far as Pakistan is concerned. We have a very simple question confronting us: whether we want to live or die as a nation? If we want to die, then we have to do nothing, because we are already on the verge of attaining our life long ambitions. If we want to live, then we should be prepared to fight for the right to live, because the tyrants and the false champions of freedom are slowly taking that right away from us and that right has to be wrenched back from their blood stained hands with blood, if necessary!

Pakistan, in many ways, is living its Gotterdammerung at the present moment and twilight always signifies the advent of dawn and dawn is always the promise of a new beginning, but between twilight and dawn also exists the interval of a night. If this is Pakistan’s twilight, then there will be a dawn, but that still is not a comfort, because no one knows how long the dark night of our misery will continue and when will it end. It is the dark night of our misfortunes, which will settle the issue of whether Pakistan will have a renaissance of a national conscience or there will only be a swan song waiting to be played out. The words of Abraham Lincoln, uttered nearly 150 years, echo and warn us that the fate of the Pakistani confederation rests within our own dissatisfied hands.

Do we even care to listen to his words?

We should, because if the color of the night of our despair is black, then the color of the our new national dawn will be red from the blood that will be required to wash away the dark sins of our past. Whatever may be our future destiny, there is no denying the fact that as a nation we are in dire need of an absolution from our own indulgent transgressions.

Are we, as a nation, capable of surviving the night long enough to see the new dawn emerging?

Will our storm tossed and weather beaten ship of state find a tranquil harbor away from the treacherous shoals and under currents?

Is there anything Pakistan and Pakistanis can hope for? Can we, as a country, hope against hope? Is our sense of hope just another false hope? What will happen to us?

What is in our future?

The answer to all these questions lies in the benevolence of time and only the passage of time, will determine the extent of our sufferings, but as mentioned earlier, we do not have the luxury of time, because we, as a nation, have squandered it away.