DREAMS can become reality and they have in certain countries. We have all heard of the American Dream, which many Pakistanis have adopted as their dream too no matter how much they may disagree with American foreign policies. The equivalent of the American Dream in the East is the Singapore Dream.

Both refer to the benefits, social and economic, of being an American or a Singaporean citizen. The Singapore Dream has even been specifically defined as the five Cs — careers, condominiums, clubs, credit cards and cars.

But much more important than these five tangible benefits are the five intangible values inherent in the concept of the Singapore Dream, or the American Dream for that matter.

These are meritocracy, fair play, equal opportunities, ethnic and religious tolerance, and rule of law. In fact, it is the adherence to these values which is the very basis of the Singapore or American Dream.

These dream benefits and values did not just fall down from the skies in these two countries. They have been built from the ground up by citizens climbing the economic ladder rung by rung, convinced that their leaders and their system can make their dreams achievable.

The ruling hand may be as democratic as it is in America or it may be as stern as it is in Singapore, but the rule in both these countries is generally fair and meritocratic, and the rule of law reigns. These two countries are being successfully governed by values that transformed a collection of people into a national collective, all working towards an identifiable national destiny.

Our founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had a similar dream for Pakistan and Pakistanis. But none of Jinnah’s successors have been able to make that dream achievable for the people.

Only a small ruling elite class, consisting of both military personnel and civilians, are enjoying the Pakistani Dream — comfortable homes, big cars, plenty of income and access to quality health care. For the rest, that dream remains elusive more so now than ever before: the rising middle class is struggling to keep its head above water while the majority lower class is living below internationally acceptable levels of human existence.

What went wrong? Why are millions of Pakistanis, instead of basking in the Pakistani Dream, living in a nightmare of inadequate social services, unemployment, poverty, violence, crime and an uncertain future?

The answer is pretty obvious. The leaders that the country has thrown up since independence have been focussing on getting into power and staying in power, all this being done with the help of a network of vested interest groups.

What the people have got are merely a lot of hollow promises and empty slogans. No leader has been able to visualize, let alone realize, a common, collective national destiny for Pakistan.

All have failed miserably to build up a system, let alone a system that works. Each leader who comes into power tries to build his own political and economic system but these systems do not survive beyond the leaders’ tenure because they are very personalized and highly politicized systems. They are not systems based on fundamental values upon which the nation could develop and prosper.

The only system that has existed throughout is the system of vested economic interests; military, political and religious lobby groups; and opportunists floating between one lobby group and another.

The result is that corruption and nepotism have ruled public life. Over the years, this kind of environment has led to a degeneration of our values to the point whereby, to use a metaphor, someone now can say that something is white even though it is actually black, and people will readily accept it as white.

At the same time, foreign aid has made domestic elites richer while keeping the masses alive on the drip. Five and a half decades into independence and Pakistan has arrived at the international marketplace, not as a seller but as a beggar. Still, our leaders insist on relying on foreign aid, if not the IMF, the World Bank and the United States.

But foreign aid, no matter how generous, cannot be a substitute for trade or private capital flows. We can only benefit from putting in place policies to attract foreign investments rather than from any amount of foreign aid.

At the same time, the developed countries can do more for developing countries like Pakistan by dismantling the protectionist barriers they have erected against Third World exports, specially in agriculture, than they can by periodically doling out aid to the world’s poor, specially aid which carry conditionalities.

But whether trade or aid, a country can only extract benefit from it if it focuses on the fundamentals, i.e. good governance and sound, pro-development policies. It is no accident the handful of newly-independent countries which focussed on good, wholesome governance in the 1950s and 1960s, like Singapore, have long since graduated to the developed world, and those that did not, have not. Significantly also, foreign aid was never the crucial, decisive factor in the development of these countries.

A country like ours where the ruled exist merely for the sake of rulers, even if they take turns to be in power or even if they rule in a balance of power, cannot have the purpose and the determination to translate a dream into reality. Pakistan cannot be governed successfully nor its people achieve prosperity if power continues to depend on vested interest groups and political lobbies, personalities and the Indian threat.

Unless our rulers learn to exist for the sake of the people rather than the ruled existing for the rulers’ sake, unless our leaders learn to govern the people instead of just leading them, and unless our rulers give the people a sense of destiny based on fundamental values rather than play politics with them, the Pakistani Dream, and all the social and economic benefits that ought to go with it, will remain an elusive goal for the citizens in general.

IT MUST be so irresistible, this itch to shoot the messenger who brings bad tidings. That’s how the media are being watched and assessed and trashed every day under the present rightwing religious dispensation in India.

“he Destructive Media” shouts the banner headline in the rabid but widely circulated journal of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh.

Anyone taking a remotely secular approach is labelled without a second thought as an Osama bin Laden acolyte. Thus this week’s Organizer thunders: “While the Indian Express is busy qualifying for FDI from Osama bin Laden, the beef-lovers of Hindustan Times are all set to wear skull caps and the Times of India, nicknamed once as the ‘Old Owl of Bori Bunder’, revels in secular darkness by instigating foreign Muslims to file cases in Europe against Narendra Modi.”

Another headline in the latest edition of the journal warns against a British conspiracy to internationlize Gujarat”.

How does one deal with this kind of daily fascist vitriol against the media, domestic or foreign? A strangely funny but possibly a good example comes to mind.

In Dec 2000, the French rap singer Stomy Bugsy was fined 1,000 francs by a court for calling far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen an ass during a clash on board a flight from Paris to Strasbourg. Two fellow musicians were also fined 1,000 francs each.

The three, all black, had argued in vain before the court that Le Pen’s complaint was unfounded considering his party’s stand towards Jews, black people and immigrants. Now that the results have come in of Le Pen’s crushing victory over his socialist rival in the French presidential race, most of Europe is up in arms, calling the presidential candidate of France a fascist, nothing less.

Moral of the story, and there seems to be at least one, is that you could call a fascist a fascist, but not an ass. A key function of journalists covering Gujarat these days is to bear the subtle difference in mind. Working with a foreign news agency some years ago was instructive in this regard, when mounting political pressure from the host government in Mumbai and pragmatic business interests of financial journalism had forced a compromise description of the Shiv Sena from being called a fanatical Hindu group to a Hindu nationalist party.

Similarly our description of the icicle in the Amarnath cave underwent a change from the “phallic symbol of Lord Shiva” to a less sexually explicit “symbol of Shiva’s spirit” or some such thing upon “advice” from an RSS official.

The story of countless, similar professional hazards confronting journalists and other assorted chroniclers is rooted in the way we see our intermingling as either a salad bowl or as cultural melting pot.

The overwhelming evidence is that we have not changed much from our past. There were a whole lot of tolerant, curious, inquisitive minds among us in the past as they are even today. And there were the intolerant lot, as those that exist to torment us today.

If we persist with finding a change in the pattern, as far as India is concerned, there has been a marginal increase in the decibels of bigotry.

For example, several centuries before BBC’s Mark Tully was thrown out from Delhi for his acid description of the then prime minister’s fading democratic persona, a prototype of the modern foreign correspondent had roamed the streets and mohallas of this sprawling country, then not yet a nation state as we know it today.

In some ways (not unlike an Amnesty International report, which is debunked by the Indian foreign office when it concerns Kashmir, and touted as gospel truth when it slams the ethnic upsurge in Karachi) the compelling observations of Alberuni, literally meaning “the foreigner”, have traditionally invited at least two diverse responses.

The 11th century chronicler had praised India for some truly scientific achievements and its amazing architecture that he saw, but he also trashed our bigotry when required.

As witness to Mahmud Ghaznavi’s marauding hordes that sacked the temples of Mathura and several more, his writings are full of unalloyed scorn for the foreign armies and their brutal, callous ways with the native Hindus.

This bit of Alberuni’s writings are often used by Hindu communalist campaigners to illustrate Muslim atrocities in this country which was otherwise deemed to be a repository of scientific temper, architectural marvels, and good humour. But like a good foreign correspondent that he was, Alberuni also tickled the fancy of the less jingoistic historians, among them Jawaharlal Nehru.

About the Indians he met and observed during his prolonged tour of this country, Alberuni the chronicler speaks up: “They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-contained and stolid. They believe there is no country like theirs, no nation like theirs, no science like theirs, no religion like theirs.”

How did Nehru respond to the criticism years later? How else could he? The open-minded historian in him took the criticism in an easy stride. In the “Discovery of India”, Nehru even describes Alberuni’s views as “probably a correct enough description of the temper of the people”.

Times have changed since then, and how. Imagine a post-Goa Atal Behari Vajpayee exposed to the 11th century chronicler’s slings and arrows about us! What would he do? Banish him, cancel his visa, ask the foreign ministry spokesperson to trash him?

But Alberuni, unperturbed by the vituperative responses he might have anticipated, continues relentlessly: “According to their belief, there is no race on earth like theirs, and no created being besides them have any knowledge or science like theirs whatsoever. Their haughtiness is such that if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan or Persia, they will think you to be either an ignoramous or a liar. If, however, they had travelled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is.”

The last line is even more instructive coming from a man who celebrated India and its diversities, something that would not have escaped the attention more recently of a Mark Tully or a James Cameron or a host of other chroniclers, journalists and charmed visitors who thronged to this land of myriad magical facets.

Rarely if ever people have failed to be entranced by India’s diversity. So, was Alberuni exaggerating the perceived narrowmindedness of his contemporary Indians?

For the jingoist among us, it would be tempting to dismiss his views as a prejudiced foreigner’s gripe against India.

Fortunately we have evidence to suggest that Alberuni’s opinions and perceptions were and still are widely shared by Indians themselves, illustrating yet another abiding facet of our varied polity. From our own homegrown sources, the mystically-minded son of India called Kabir, comes to mind.

He too liked to speak his mind, especially to his own people near the ghats of Varanasi.

There was no government spokesman in those days to trash Kabirdas. If anything, Hindus and Muslims grappled with each other to claim his legacy, such was his spiritual hold on both.

The Hindus, avers Kabir tartly, would fondly fall asleep at the feet of a prostitute, but they would not allow the lower castes to touch their kitchen vessels. As for the Muslims, they are slammed for their men marrying their aunt’s daughters!

Prime Minister Vajpayee may wish to dismiss Alberuni’s perspectives on India — as he has done with the western criticism on Gujarat — on the myopic grounds that they come from foreigners. He then should listen at least to our own homegrown Kabir.

THE referendum is over and the district-wise results have been declared in detail. The credit for the president’s success is being mainly claimed by district Nazimeen, other minions of the district governments and by the traders.

Gen Tanveer Naqvi can claim that it were the Nazimeen, as was the case with the chairmen of the local bodies during the Zia period, who paved the way for victory not only for the General but also for their own men in the next promised general elections for which new identity cards could not be used because Nadra would not be able to produce as many cards as are needed for the elections. Only the agents moving around the Nadra offices can solve the identity card problem at reasonable rates.

In the light of the past experience of selections and elections (except the elections of 1945-46 and 1970) all of them were won by those who had found favour with the ruling party or the ruling elite, even if they were the elections of 1951 or 1965 but that would be going too far back. Let us recall only the recent events in the Punjab on the electoral front.

In 1990, Mr Ghulam Ishaq Khan was the ad hoc president (he did not earn a bad name in financial and personal matters as is the case with the referendum-backed president, Gen Pervez Musharraf). The Benazir Bhutto government earned the wrath of Gen Mirza Aslam Beg and other service chiefs because she wanted to retire the CONS, Admiral Sarohi. All the anti-PPP forces, including the NPP, the Nawaz-Junejo League, were installed in the caretaker federal and provincial governments and Jam Sadiq Ali was made chief minister of Sindh with the single task of ensuring that Ms Bhutto should be deprived of even the remotest chance of forming a government in that province. After the elections, the late Jam Sadiq had said had he been allowed, mother (Nusrat) and daughter would have been permanently thrown out of the assembly and the world saw that in what was once the power-centre of the PPP — Lahore — the party could win only one seat and the lucky man was Aitzaz Ahsan. And when Farooq Leghari, Gen Jehangir Karamat and Sajjad Ali Shah turned against Ms Bhutto in 1996, she could not win a single NA seat in the whole of the Punjab.

Our parties, including the PPP and the PML, have no ideological workers and leaders. They have now only those candidates who have either home boroughs or have earned them through unfair means or bought them outright. Their reputation is no better than that of the former parliamentarians who are openly siding with the General.

The power and the resources at the disposal of the district Nazimeen are not ordinary. They will play a major role in the coming elections, and they will certainly support those who find favour with the General or the caretaker governments which the General may form as per tradition, and through which people like Jam Sadiq Ali could be specially commissioned.

Who are the district Nazimeen in the Punjab? Let us start from Attock. It is Maj Tahir Sadiq (retired) who was the PML MPA in 1997. His father, Sardar Sadiq, and his mother, Musarrat, both had been members of the Punjab Assembly closely associated with Mr Nawaz Sharif. Now Tahir Sadiq is with Chaudhry Shujaat Husain and both of them are in the Azhar League. Tahir is related to the Shujaat family and the Gujrat Nazim is Shujaat’s younger brother.

The Nazim of Pakpattan is Muhammad Amjad Joyia, the son of Mian Faiz Ahmad, a big landlord from Ferozepur, who settled in Sahiwal after partition. Mian Faiz was the first to become the Daultana League’s MLA on reserved seat for mohajirs in 1951 and in 1977 on the PPP ticket. His son, Amjad, contrary to the decision of the PPP, contested and won the provincial election in 1985, in 1988 he got a PPP ticket and won while in 1990, he was the IJI’s winning candidate because in 1990 the IJI under the wings of Mr Ishaq Khan and Mirza Aslam Beg was in full cry. In 1993, he voted for the no-confidence motion against Ghulam Hyder Wyne and sided with Mian Manzoor Wattoo. In the 1993 elections, he again got a PPP ticket and won the NA seat. What would anybody expect from such district Nazimeen or for that matter, from any of the other Nazimeen when Asif Zardari’s sister and Ms Bhutto’s sister-in-law presents a welcome address to the General on behalf of her own district?

The overwhelming majority of our traditional parliamentarians can well judge which way the wind is blowing and if elected in the October elections, they will choose the next president or confirm the results of the referendum. The exercise will be slightly different from the style of the late Gen Ziaul Haq because according to Gen Musharraf, the latter was a ‘munafiq’ (hypocrite) which he is not. However, he is being supported by the sons of the “munafiqin” of the past and they are Gohar Ayub and Ejazul Haq.

Gen Musharraf can call some people ‘munafiq’ because he is in the saddle while we cannot do so but we can say that all the MNAs elected from Lahore in 1997 supported the deletion of the Eighth Amendment and supported another amendment according to which any MNA or MPA opposing or differing with a party would have lost his membership of an assembly. How many MNAs from Lahore now stand committed to that amendment? At least six out of eight have abandoned their loyalty and are now four square behind the General, and his referendum including their joint creation known as Mian Amir Mehmood.

All these indications enable me to predict that elections-2002 will be won by those who want to have Gen Pervez Musharraf in the driving seat. That may be the verdict of the Punjab and the other provinces.

TWO armies, over a half million-strong; air forces fielding some 40-50 squadrons (1:2 ratio) and navies deploying an armada of destroyers, submarines, cruisers, missile boats (India only) mine layers and sweeper and a single aircraft carrier (India’s Viraant) make an dauntingly formidable force ready to go into action at a wink. This is not to include a whole panoply of tanks, artillery, in one to two and one to three ratio; land- based gun-locating radars, airborne early warning systems and a whole lot of other weapons.

The above is just a guess of the aggressive build-up on either side of the dangerous crossing. The actual inventory, a top secret, until the curtain rises, should in each case, be on the higher side.

Now there is bad news from New Delhi. One relates to a high- level meeting of the military brass addressed, somewhat unconventionally, by Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, one of the best-known BJP hawks, in place of Defence Minister George Fernandes, a Samata party ally. The ‘hour-long closed door’ briefing was attended by three service chiefs, Gen S. Padmanabhan, Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy and Admiral Madhvendra Singh. The subject discussed was reported to be the prolonged and massive troop build-up along the western land borders, air space and sea.

The second bit of news, more alarming than the first, concerns the raising of the strategic nuclear command (SNC) and its actual activation by June under the operational command of the Indian Air Force. This brings to an end the inter- service controversy about the overall command and control of the ‘nuclear assets’.

As the seniormost service, holding aloft the overarching strategic umbrella, the Indian army, had contended for the place to consolidate its operational hegemony but was sidelined. The retiring air chief, the indefatigable Air Chief Marshal A.Y. Tipnis, opposed the army tooth and nail and carried the day. However, the appointment of an army lieutenant-general, Ponkaj Joshi, as the chief of the newly-raised integrated defence staff (IDS) places the IAF itself technically under the army together with the nuclear command structure. The appointment of Gen Joshi is, however, said to be ‘an interim arrangement’ until the appointment of a four-star general, flag or air officer as the chief of the defence staff (CDS).

It is to be noted that the appointment of the CDS remains the cause of bitter inter-service rivalry. The nomination of the previous naval chief, Admiral Sushil Kumar, as the first CDS and the stout opposition to it by Air Chief Marshal Tipnis caused Admiral Satish Kumar put in his papers for premature retirement.

Now the two reports, specially the second about the SNC, put together, make a most ominous reading. The formation of the strategic nuclear command being operationally-driven, dilutes, if not exactly replaces the whole concept of nuclear deterrence. At a certain stage of its phased development, the SNC would operationalize nuclear India and may well tempt it to act as the regional nuclear bully or ‘compeller’. In other words, to trade deterrence for ‘compellence’ and thus lead to a rapid escalation of a nuclear race between the ‘compeller’ and the ‘compellee’ (Pakistan). India’s evolving nuclear posture is a quantum jump from its draft nuclear doctrine enunciated in August 1999.

As for the second news item pertaining to the existing front- loaded force build-up, it should either peter out in a tame endgame or spurt into a violent showdown.

The time for a showdown could be high summer when snow would have melted away and hills and dales of Kashmir would be ready for a Kargil-like operation under heavy artillery-air cover with light armour in support of massive infantry battalions. The simple logic behind any such aggressive move by India would be to show something for all the expense incurred; the wear and tear and attrition suffered through the prolonged stand-off.

The problem facing India’s army brass remains much the same as would be of any military command’s poised for aggressive action. Even a ‘limited offensive holding operation’ such as the Indian high command might have been planning to launch carries the potential of flaring up into a wider conflict.

India has persistently refused to de-escalate until the attainment of their grand strategic objective. This is the cessation of all ‘cross-border’ terrorist incursions and the elimination of the ‘terrorist camps’ on the Pakistan side of the LoC and within its international borders. Last year’s 9/11 attack, in New York and Washington and America’s open-ended declaration of waging a global war against terrorism, emboldened India to narrow the US campaign down to Kashmir and label the Kashmiris’ freedom fight as acts of terrorism, aided and abetted by Pakistan.

The December 13 attack on the Indian parliament, coupled with its aggressive posturings against Pakistan ever since, spurred the massive build-up on land, air. Pakistan responded similarly moving its forces up front to meet the looming Indian threat.

The question now is as to how long the two forces could afford to stay eyeball-to-eyeball. Eradication of terrorist camps, supposedly located across the LoC and well inside Pakistan, make a staggeringly scattered target hard to pin down, and harder to hit.

Engaging and taking them out effectively must entail not only hot pursuit but also deep penetration of Pakistan’s territory. And that would mean war with the attendant risk and potential of escalation beyond a plan no matter how calculated and foolproof. India must, in the next few weeks or so, decide whether to pull out or force a showdown.

The author is a former director of ISPR.