THE way the Pakistani hive mind works can often leave you with the feeling that either you yourself are mad, or everybody else is.

Consider the word that has recently been doing the rounds: that the army must somehow, constitutionally and without initiating a coup, save the country. Are we crazy? True, there are a formidable number of challenges facing us — not that that is anything new.

From an unwieldy and seemingly escalating war with the obscurantists variously labelled as ‘terrorists’, ‘militants’ and ‘insurgents’ to a tanking economy, power shortages and the crisis of the flood-affected and the internally displaced, Pakistan is facing a host of issues of the sort that would deflate the optimist wearing even the rosiest of rose-tinted spectacles.

But what is the army, with its boots and guns and with its hands full, meant to do about this? Ask someone making this suggestion and they tend to do the metaphorical equivalent of shuffling their feet in embarrassment, grumbling about extraordinary times dictating extraordinary measures and how “somebody has to do something”. Such murmurings recently came to a head in certain sections of the media but they’re nothing new, really.

Since this phase of Pakistan’s flirtation with democracy began, sections of a shadowy ‘civil society’ have been mumbling about Pakistan being unfit for civilian rule — i.e. this country’s people need the stick, not the carrot — and about the ruling parties being unfit to rule. This is the same ‘civil society’, incidentally, that historically has refused to vote or participate much in politics and, most ironically, heaved itself out of its armchair only to boo the most recent of Pakistan’s civic-minded military rulers.

The basic trouble with a number of Pakistanis is that their memories are too short. Disconnected from the past, having learnt few lessons and even fewer truths, we float in an endless present, severed from history or context and therefore living in a present shorn of meaning.

We treat every crisis as a stand-alone affront, refusing to look at its roots and flailing ineffectively instead at its fruit, and then being flummoxed by the fact that a new shoot has sprung up elsewhere. As a society, generally, we try to understand the present through lots of single-frame ‘nows’, and become frustrated when the meaning that looking at the whole reel would produce is not forthcoming.

It seems that four crippling bouts of military takeovers have not been enough to make it clear to us, once and for all, that the tin hats’ exit leaves us worse off, and with even more systemic issues than we had before. Forget history, even the memory of events in our own lifetimes, just a few years ago, tends to evaporate from our minds.

Take the power crisis that is the first thing on everybody’s minds these days. If I had a rupee for each time I’ve heard someone, from drawing-room activists to people in shops and on the streets or being interviewed on television, say that we had electricity during the Musharraf years — well, I’d be quite rich by now, even while factoring in inflation. The implication is that Musharraf gave us electricity, the present government took it away.

Yes, there was far less loadshedding then. But did the present government start its time in office by shutting down power plants and thereby creating the crisis?

Rationally, we have no electricity now because for nearly a decade, nobody did much to cater to the future needs of a growing population, expanding industry and increasing urbanisation. There was little investment in the power-generation infrastructure and next to no planning. The result, which anybody could have guessed, is that now there is simply not enough to go around.

While bemoaning their fate today, how many people bother to remember that back in the 1990s, Pakistan had a surfeit of electricity and there was talk of selling it to India?

Pakistan’s tragedy is, and always has been, the tendency to reset to a baseline mode of existence which involves perpetually taking two steps back for each one forward, and that too with a unique variety of muddled thinking in which anything that is not a quick-fix solution is not worth considering.

That explains why there is such a widespread tendency to view democracy as some sort of magic wand which, if waved even once, will without further ado solve all our problems. And that, in turn, is the reason that a lot of people are especially critical of this government and the mess that it is overseeing.

Democracy has failed us, goes the line of thinking, because, see, we have it and yet our problems are only multiplying. Obviously, democracy doesn’t work. Bring on the tin hats.

But democracy is not a goal in and of itself, obviously, and neither is it the sacred cow that many people view it as. It is incredible that one has to explain the fact that it is a process, but one does. Democracy allows you to vote in the people of your choice, and if the choice is only between the devil and the deep blue sea, then so be it.

They can carry on doing the damage that they do and in five years’ time, we’ll be wiser and can refuse to vote for them.

Dictatorships, on the other hand, you’re stuck with. Demand of any general in the presidency, ‘You and whose army?’, and all he has to do is point out of the window.

Many of us Pakistanis, with our short memories and desire for instant solutions, do not see this. And because we fail to learn from history, we live in an endless cycle of making the same mistakes over and over again.

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com