Black Pakistan and White Pakistan

Saima,

I am sorry but this is too simplistic... unlike your other pieces.

To use the hackneyed analogy ... The reality is in shades of grey... and not black and white patches... Therefore most Pakistanis continue in a state of harmony... not threatened by white or black. For most Pakistanis... Grey is harmony not discord...

The global order is also grey not white.

Humanity is grey. So why decry grey...

Unless ofcourse you wanted to portray the ridiculousness of black and white ``reality``... in which case... RIGHT ON.

If there were not faujiz ruling the nation, this whole analysis would be highly ordinary and reflective of arm-chair and bored analysis.

To quote you, Pakistan is ``a paradox of grey``.

By this I mean - the Pakistanis that I have met, and I have met many over the last 15 years, are not consistent in their belief systems.

This is human, and one must recognise that this is so.

Perhaps Pakistanis are pulled by many different forces :
- the need to appear to be religious
- the need to appear modern
- the need to preserve cultural traditions
- the need of garner wealth

In many situations these are compelling and yet opposite forces, for example, sending a son or daughter to the US for studies, and insisting that (s)he does not date anyone, and if (s)he does, that the person is a Pakistani.

I am sure this causes enormous stress.

I have seen this stress aplenty in the US< where Indian-born parents struggle with how to handle America born teen-age children who live in a completely different world. That is the principal reason why I returned to India after my MBA. I could not see myself handling this situation. I could not make myself become an American at the age of 25, nor could I remain an Indian while my children were American.

As regards the so-termed Black Pakistanis, they will forever be downtrodden unless one of two things happen :
- Democracy develops in Pakistan, the Army goes back to barracks, and the feudal Lords lose their grip on the population, so that the Black Pakistanis have a voice (as did the Black Indians when they threw out Indira Gandhi after the Emergency, then brought her back when Morarji Desai failed, and lately, threw out the BJP Government in rejection of the ``India Shining`` slogan) and/or
- Technology brings affluence to the poor.

I cannot see the first happening in even the distant future. So let`s give that a pass.

The second is possible.

It is happening in India, and even in Bangladesh.

Indian farmers can now get instant updates on prices of foodgrains not only in the major mandis in India, but also at the Chicago Commodities Exchange.

Fishermen in Kerala can use cell phones to find out the where shoals of fish are in the sea, located by satellites, and use a GPS system to reach the fish shoals.

Gramin Bank in Bangladesh finances mobile phones so that villagers can reach various traders to get the best prices for their produce.

A very moving picture I saw recently was that of an evidently poor Bangladeshi woman, in the middle of a field with two goats, talking on a mobile phone.

That is the way forward.

It has begun in India. The pace of growth of technology-aided poverty alleviation is astounding.

That needs to happen in Pakistan.

Will the White pakistanis let it happen ?

Rozaiba...

Well said... had we allowed democracy to take root... without having the army to fudge the whole process... perhaps ... the ``Black and White`` would not be so stark...

I wonder... where Ahmed Faraz stands on this spectrum.. given that he is proudly Pakistani and yet equally critical of the country`s drawbacks..

nbtendu...

Perhaps your confidence in your country`s ``povery alleviation`` is a little misplaced. But I won`t get into that... except suggesting that every Indian who visits Pakistan, doesn`t exactly find Pakistan the poverty-stricken backward (in comparison) backwater that is the wetdream of most Indians.

Re: # 4

Erm everyone from bhangi`s to sharecroppers have fucking cell phones in Pakistan.

Saima:

``In Pakistan you will be able to read news about the entire world but very little local news. There is also very little local business news. In the business sections you are more than likely to hear about multinational corporations and aid donations but not about indigenous business houses.``

I think you have to update your information based on the in-depth TV channels that have emerged. Many of them are specialized, Business Plus, GEO TV, INDUS, APPNA etc are very good channels vis a vis covering local news. I don`t see them harping on the international more than necessary. There are also special magazines that cater to IT like Spider or Politics, like Herald, so there you have most of the editorialized and original takes on local events.

As for the black and white Pakistan, I think its not that there is an uncontrollable black Pakistan that gets us the bad press abroad, its that our leaders simply haven`t reached a consensus on abandoning superstition and opting for modernity, generally speaking, so we move in multi-direction and visionless fields. The world rewards unity of purpose, and we are not decisive as a nation. Many of the issues we now face are inherited by global conflicts that prompted us to devise a small state foreign policy to protect our interests.

We have to identify our strengths and build on them.

Aisha Sarwari

So what are you author – black or white?

And are you the one or the other ALL the time?

Let’s go find that BLACK Pakistani and then beat the crap out of him (unless it’s a she, then beat the crap out of her) – that will solve all the problems.

Also, while we are at it – lets’ find everything we never liked and sweep it together into that trash can and clearly mark it BLACK. So the black remains clearly separated from the white!

And now that we got it all figured out, where do we go from here?

I got it – lets’s ask for a separate country for the whites where they can live peacefully (and be SECULAR, mind you – no discrimination based on color!), unhindered by the “animosity” of the blacks! And then maybe the white Pakistanis can put YOU on a pedestal from where you can never come down – and if they still come out a cropper – always find somebody ELSE to blame!

What a smart brain wave!

It’s so, so, so EXCLUSIVE!

There are elements of truth no doubt in the article - notably, the gap between the haves vs have-nots and the presence of religious extremists in the country. Ultimately though the article is a fine example of Romairesque prose: subjective impressions which the author presents as facts.

NB: Romairesque prose is by now a well established genre in english literature. The term honors, as you may have guessed, the style practiced by our own chowk poster, General Romair, Nishan-i-Haider, Victoria Cross, Croix de la Guerre.

Was it because of prejudice against Pakistan?


To borrow from bubba: It`s the jihad, stupid.

At headline moments Pakistan usually goes into denial, starts and aborts definitive action of the kind the rest of the world wants to see (e.g., it tempers extreme opinion and hate rhetoric instead of changing legislation) while it worries about whether New York Times writes well about Pakistan, and world opinion.

that about sum it very well.

re: Saima Shah

Pakistan is a developing nation and it is a young nation and it is in the process of an evolution, which encompasses the entire spectrum of issues. There is a lack of clarity on most issues and there is a clash of ideas occuring in Pakistan. These ideas are, regardless of whether one agrees with them or not, dynamic in their expressions and they are all involved in a fight to influence the still emerging debate in Pakistan on the nature of what direction the nation might undertake in the future. As Hegel said, history is the clash of great ideas and in Pakistan, we are engaged in that clash, to determine what will be future of this nation.

Pakistani society, whether one agrees or disagrees, is caught up in a vortex and there is literally a battle raging for the soul of Pakistan. There are people articulating ideas, of what Pakistan means and should mean in the future. This is not an identity crisis of a national kind, but rather it is a process of reconcilation, where all the different ideas expressing their believes about Pakistan; right or wrong, will be placed in a niche of their own and out of all of this, there will emerge a new moasic of Pakistan.

I will never deny the complexities of the problems and the issues facing Pakistan and from my point of view, which is of a secular progressive democratic Pakistan, the counter-arguments are medieval and self-defeating. I disagree, with them, but I will not marginalize them as trival, because that would be worst mistake, we as a nation can make at this point in time of our development. We need to create a ``breathing space`` for dissenting voices and not muffle them through some infantile binary response made on notions of an exclusivist color schemes.

The last thing, which Pakistan needs is another form of segregation and instead; we as a nation have to tear down the walls, which we have ourselves created to make distinctions and which, have done nothing but made Pakistan into a maze of contradictory ideas, which your article tries to shed some light upon. This is a very interesting article, which is a polite way of suggesting that it is filled, with too many generalities almost bordering on the fringes of banality. Contary to your article`s summation of keeping a balance, there will have to be a confluence, which creates a shade of grey instead of maintaining ``black`` and ``white`` in their proper prespectives.

A balance, as you suggest is, theoretically possible, but it posits the situation, in Pakistan, on the hypothesis of a constant conflict and seeks to maintain the society on the basis of a perpetual conflict, with a gradually narrowing scope of compromise. The idea of the hour in Pakistan is to create a sense of tolerance and any such tolerance, will not come from another defination of an apartheid, but from admitting that Pakistani society has complex historic, social, religious, ethnic and economic antecedents, which make it imperative that it has to learn to balance all its ``colors`` in a harmony. Maintaining ``black`` and ``white`` in Pakistan is antithetical to the notions of tolerance, dissent and multipolarity, because ``white`` and black`` denote a contrast; a clash; a idea of an irreconciable differences.

A nation`s life is not all that different from an individual`s life, because the choices are never clear or easily understood in the tulmut of the moment, when such decisions need to be made. Life, and a nation`s policy choices, are semantics of varying shades of acceptability opting between the least attractive choices hoping, always, to make the best of a worst situation. Life and its choices cannot be explained as a neat ``paint within the lines`` syndrome and neither can the evolutionary process of nations be limited, within a sociological explantion of it myriad salient discrepencies.

Lives of nations and of individuals are not black or white and neither are they, contary to popular misconceptions, grey. They are in fact colorless. They are colorless at the moment of the decision and it is only afterwards, with hindsight that color creeps into our decisions as we seek to justify our choices. The attributes of colors comes from our endeavors to rationale our choices and make them seem sensible to us, thereby reinforcing in ourselves the notions of a reaffirmation of our own choice.

The same principle applies to Pakistan. Pakistan exists in a colorless world, with differing and contrasting ideas clamouring for an audience and what marks the Pakistani society is not a balance scheme of colors as much as it is an inchoate symphony of ideas, which engulfs it. There is a natural balance in the Pakistani society, but it has been askewed because of the intentions, such as those espoused in the article, which seek by forced reasons to piegon hole the realities of Pakistan into a cliché. The natural balance of Pakistan has to be allowed to re-assert itself and that means, that the judgement of the people of Pakistan has to be accepted and trusted by the rulers of this nation, in uniform or in mufti. It means that civil society has to be allowed to express its own sense of a social, political and economic equalibrium as it evolves its own understanding of such terms, without outside interventions or artificially inspired political and social engineerings.

It means that the discordant symphony of Pakistan has to be allowed to find its own haromonoius tune and it means that instead of overpowering a particular instrument and its sound, efforts must be made to seamlessly blend that sound into overall sounds of the symphony so that it compliments the orhrestra`s efforts.

Ciao

I have an issues with the premise on which Saima bases this writeup. What Saima refers to as Black and White Pakistan is in essence a Red (bleeding) and Blue (bruised) Pakistan. I think Saima means a ‘White’ industrial urban Pakistan with US $2,200 GDP per capita and a Black ‘rural’ agricultural Pakistan with per capita GDP of $ 2,198. The culprit is the rural-to-urban migration, which suppresses the wages in rural sector by reducing the marginal productivity of labor. The solution lies in improving the wage structure in the agricultural sector. How can that be achieved? It can be achieved by not blaming CNN, by taking the head out of Molvi’s ass, and by hiring some world class economists to help reduce the misery. It is really very simple. In President Clinton’s words “we know how to fight poverty”. Billy was talking thru his behind as he has no clue as to how to fight Allah MiaN in Pakistan, the main culprit behind a Red and Blue Pakistan.

Pakistan is a Yugoslavia in waiting.

ferozk...

Brilliant... the unfortunate reality is that the nay-sayers, the bashers and the haterz are all too ready to sign Pakistan`s death certificate... even though 50 years in the life of a nation are probably like 5 years in the life of an individual... if at all.. (given 100 years life span and the emergence of European Nation states 5 centuries ago) ...

I wonder what Black White Red Orange Blue Green and Yellow comparisons would one see if one were to visit the United States just before and around the time of the civil war... and that was almost a 100 years after its revolution...

Those who see Yugoslavia or even a USSR.. should think again... and maybe think long term... for what is stable today might not be stable tomorrow... but Pakistan will exist beyond our time ...

Hai Hai Manto, whatever happened to East Pakistan? Anything that starts with a big bang goes into oblivion with one too. You can’t compare Pakistan with the United States, as one was a revolutionary country and the other was a not very well thought off fart of some Islamic morons who thought that religion come before ethnic-nationalist affiliations. It was proven in 1971 how stupid and wrong that ideology was. I think we should get the rest of it over with sooner than later.