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IT is ironic that in the wake of the right-wing political mantra about a ‘free’ and ‘sovereign’ Pakistan, recent reports on socio-cultural indicators depict a dismal picture of the country’s strategic, political and civilisational isolation from the rest of the world.
Such socio-cultural indicators include our status in education, health, human rights and security in comparison to regional and international states. While rejecting governmental statistics, Unesco ranks Pakistan at 180 in the global literacy index. The BBC adds that even amongst those who are literate, the overwhelming majority is comprised of the elderly generations — this means that the literacy rate in the country decreases with the increase in population. This seems anachronistic in the context of the Millennium Development Goals.
While the rest of world has almost succeeded in defeating polio in all its forms, the national and international media report that there has been a 24pc increase in the number of polio cases in Pakistan. As reported earlier this month, in Fata alone some 47,099 parents refused to allow the vaccine to be administered to their children due to multiple reasons. Prominent amongst these reasons are the threats issued by militant organisations.
Women’s rights constitute only a segment of human rights in general. A column by human rights activist I.A. Rehman published recently in this newspaper reported that “according to a non-official count 5,151 women have been subjected to violence this year in Punjab alone — among them 774 murdered, 217 killed for ‘honour’, 1,569 abducted, 706 raped/gang-raped and 427 driven to suicide”. If this is the situation regarding this one sector in a single province, the overall situation regarding human rights in Pakistan is not difficult to gauge.
A global risk analytics organisation, Maplecroft, released a report entitled Human Rights Risk Atlas 2014 on Dec 4. It puts Pakistan in the “extreme risk” countries as far as human security is concerned. Pakistan stands fourth in the list of highly risky countries while Afghanistan stands sixth and Myanmar stands eighth.
The semantics and implications of freedom, sovereignty and autonomy seem to have become relative in the present world. States appear to walk a tightrope while keeping a balance between preserving their sovereignty and strategic-economic-political cooperation with each other. The recent past is replete with examples of states leaning towards one or the other extreme of the sovereignty continuum at the cost of political and economic losses and gains.
States that opted to sail against the tide of civilisation, mainstream international political discourse and a mainstream economic paradigm put themselves at the risk of marginalisation. They also pushed their citizens towards higher levels of socio-economic misery. This is not to say that sovereignty is, in itself, irrelevant but to emphasise the urgency of inevitable regional and global cooperation in almost all spheres of life.
Isolation usually starts from the contours of foreign policy and reaches civilisational anachronism. In the current world, a country might face three structural and strategic setbacks if it slides into isolation regionally and internationally. First, it might become embroiled in severe economic straits. Second, it might lose the strategic gains that are necessary for political influence. Third, isolation might lead a country to historical and civilisational anachronism.
The labyrinth of a centrist mindset, elitism and autocracy led Pakistan to the negation of democratic pluralism on the one hand and a monopoly over foreign policy by unelected power centres on the other. Religious zeal and super-patriotism came in handy in legitimising this monopoly by powerful centres of power.
The political fault lines of the deprivation in Balochistan, the black hole of Fata’s Frontier Crimes Regulation and the intermittent taking over of power by non-elected regimes are but a few examples of internal marginalisation.
The use of ‘jihad’ and the consequent facilitation of private militias in achieving foreign-policy objectives, support for non-state proxies in our western and eastern neighbourhoods and the lack of vision in finding common grounds for trade and commerce with the Central Asian Republics, the Far East, Gulf states, Europe and North America led to external isolation.
This vicious circle needs to be broken. For this to happen, Pakistan needs to take measures on an urgent basis to halt internal marginalisation and external isolation simultaneously. The emerging voices of the media, civil society organisations, think tanks and the intelligentsia need to facilitate the government and political leadership in formulating policy frameworks that will break these vicious cycles.
Given the phenomenal changes that are going to occur in the region over the coming year, Pakistan might find itself in a critically challenging situation. It needs to keep in mind that history might not repeat itself all the time.
The writer is a political analyst.
Twitter: @khadimhussain4
