Oh Myopia, Thy Name is Pakistan

A few years ago, I asked a very dear friend, Dupont Haider Hannafi, who was the MD of a leading French pharmaceutical company in Pakistan, “You have been here seven years now; what, in your opinion, is the distinguishing feature of Pakistani community?” He went into deep thought for a moment, looking at the ceiling, he finally said softly, “Myopia.” He was, of course, speaking with general reference to the business community he mingled with but at one point, dilating on it, he said, “most people cannot see beyond the end of their noses.” He was a Muslim of Algerian descent, a hybrid of East and West with great compassion for Pakistan. He married a local girl, groomed her into a lady of impeccable style and now he is retired in France. He loved Pakistan; still that was his dispassionate opinion. So I am not quoting a prejudiced critic here.

I have lived with this malady of the short term vision long enough to have developed some random hypothesis that I wish to share with readers today. Perhaps for my good fortune to have had a philosophic grand father who kept stimulating the curiosity in me as a child and a father who always thought ‘out of the box’, quite radically – both were very religious in liberal sort of way – that I developed a habit of plural thinking about life, quite comfortable at an early age with uncertainties that emerge if one is to entertain contradictory ideas. However, even my ‘thinking’ elders inadvertently pushed me into a career I wasn’t cut for and half a century later I am still trying to find a path to where my better talents lie. This was not my individual crisis; I have found every second person in this country to have suffered this predicament. Career planning is not something anyone cares much about in our society. Market opportunities, personal fancies of parents and socio-political connections determine careers of young people, far more than temperamental adaptability. So we find chemical engineers running IT, bureaucrats turned journalists, doctors running bureaucracies and soldiers running educational institutions.

When I started practical farming, my first priority was soil conservation because that is what the real wealth of a farmer is in the long run. Over couple of decades, my farm turned from a virtual desert to a highly productive piece of land, while other farmers turned around their fertile soils into a virtual desert. I would forego immediate profits for future gains and I was considered a little woolly in the head by fellow farmers. Today the ‘desertification of Punjab’ as I term it, is proceeding rapidly due to wrong use of fertilizers and unfit irrigation water without any soil conservation strategy. I have not been able to draw anyone’s attention to this serious crisis over the past thirty years because I am talking long term; the disaster is not immediate.

As I got into consultancy business, I found that the bane of the short term vision ruled the planners. As Dr. Akmal Hussain once put it, “When we as consultants used to talk about the long term we were told to focus on the short term: Now we have ignored the long term for so long and so much that even short term solutions are not viable.”

When you look at the political developments over the past five decades, in retrospect, it is one long story of myopic decisions, leading the country from one disaster to another. Political thought is non-existent because that entails long term thinking. The proclivity of running to the lessons from the past is so strong that the society has stopped living in the present, leave alone thinking about the future. Pick up newspapers and journals and what do you find? Long diatribes about petty, immediate political manoeuvres of no consequence. If we were to sum up our political story it is quite simply a series of reactions to short term decisions and actions. Power hungry politicians of the fifties abdicated security issues to the military and their irreconcilable differences paved way for military takeover – in the name of internal security. Military rule of the sixties ignored social and regional equity in pursuit of linear economic growth that created two reactions: the separation of East Pakistan and rise of Bhutto’s socialism. The quasi-socialist seventies created fertile ground for retrogressive forces that General Zia exploited in the name of Islam. Zia’s legacies pushed Pakistan into international isolation during the nineties and harboured fanatical militancy which has now become a millstone round the nation’s neck.

The present regime is having to save face while backtracking over past convictions on Afghan and Kashmir policies, which share the umbilical cord with militant fanaticism. The irony of it all is that the grand concessions being made today have exposed the ill-planned, short term strategies of the past. For all the allegations and counter allegations being hurled between the military and the civilian polity both are guilty of endorsing policies when they were being drafted and executed – exploding the nuclear device for example had a national consensus. The latest confession about nuclear technology being leaked out by individuals has put egg on military establishment’s face; one place where it cannot pass the buck to the civilians since it was the zealous custodians of it all along.

To put it briefly, there hasn’t been one long term decision or strategy that Pakistan can show with pride to have had the desired consequences. Wisdom is the ability to achieve desired results in the long run; foolishness is the propensity to grab the immediate opportunity today and harm oneself tomorrow. Enlightened self-interest is not as dazzling as street-smart wizardry but it prevails in the end. Ask poor Zardari, was it worth it?

Two hypotheses that may inflame chauvinistic passions provide clues to the roots of national myopia. First is the theological ethos that relegates this life to the short term in toto, the transitory; long term is after life of infinite rewards. Real investment in the future, therefore, lies in theological practices and ceremonial compliance as negotiable instruments to heaven – not strictly true but that’s what people are made to believe by faith peddlers.

The second element of myopia has its roots in the specific historical experience of the decades before independence. The existential situation for Muslims of the subcontinent was traumatic in the period beginning from 1857 till partition. They were born with a grand cultural and political heritage of over a thousand years of global supremacy. They had ruled India for over 700 years unchallenged, which had nurtured a great sense of racial superiority. After the fall of the moghul empire, that supremacy was eroded by the rise of Hindu economic ascendancy and British colonial rule. Muslim aristocracy was reduced to symbolic remnants of their past. Real power had drained out of their ranks. In trying to compromise reality with inherited self-image they had to find a new identity on the basis of human rights, not even as equals but as a handicapped community. The uncertainty and the terror that must have chilled their bones are hard to imagine for us as the post-partition generation. I have sensed the goose pimples on the soul of my elder generation as a sensitive child and as an avid observer subsequently. It is an established psychological phenomenon that a frightened man has no sense of the long term; his attention is all focussed on the immediate escape from terror. Myopia becomes a second nature since all faculties are required to cope with the present. A man being chased by a rabid dog cannot stop short to find the best vantage point to enjoy a beautiful sunset.

Something of that nature happened to the generation that struggled, sacrificed and fought for a separate homeland of Muslims in India. Having achieved their goal, the characteristics required for building a nation were quite different from the ones that created it. And those have not developed! Myopia has become an endemic flaw of the nation. I have faith in the post-partition generation which is growing up free of past phobias or distorted perceptions of the world around them.