SIXTEEN years ago, on May 28, 1998, we became a much-touted ‘seventh nuclear power of the world’ as one of the numerous half-page ads issued by the government in major newspapers boasted.

With Pakistan descending into the abyss today, delving into the newspaper archives of May 1998 was a painful exercise for me. The drama that accompanied the explosions was a farce. A tragi-comedy.

The ads published after the explosions proclaimed: “Today every Pakistani is proud that the sovereign ideological and geographical boundaries of their country are in safe and patriotic hands.” Fifty-one years after partition, we were reminded through another advertisement: “In 1947 we crossed rivers of blood and sacrifices to earn our independence.”

Nuclear priorities have not allowed us to focus on the people.

We pretended to be gung-ho about our achievement which was actually no achievement considering how we have been destroyed by our nuclear misadventures. We were told, “On the way to glory … Step forward … to your prosperity, to national security & self-reliance”. Then we were informed: “We are a nation that stands tall.”

One could go on for there were so many advertisements which were followed a year later by a fresh lot when Yaum-i-Takbir was observed. They couldn’t escape the readers’ notice. But public memory is notoriously short. They look so ludicrous in hindsight. “We have never accepted anyone’s supremacy like a coward. Preferred liberty over servitude, trial over comfort, gallantry over gluttony.” We were also assured: “The entire nation is prepared to face any sanctions and geared to defend the country that gave us our identity.”

The ad that took the icing on the cake appealed to the people of Pakistan not to buy dollars, to have faith in the national economy and repose confidence in the leadership because “you are now a nuclear power and need not be afraid”. And then came the warnings to people to pay their taxes and a plea to contribute to the National Self-Reliance Fund that was floated three days after Chaghi to neutralise the sanctions that were imposed.

In this context, the thoughtful preface to Pervez Hoodbhoy’s book Confronting the Bomb, by John Polyani is worth reading. The Nobel laureate in chemistry identifies the origin of the ‘plague of nuclear weapons’ as “fear, pride and folly”. I will call it the FPF syndrome. How correct Polyani is. One may also see that when these three elements converge at a given point in time they inevitably lead to disaster.

Pakistan has nursed the FPF syndrome ever since the country’s inception in 1947. In fact, even earlier fear, pride and folly in varying degrees and at staggered intervals created conditions that made it possible for a new state to be born on shaky premises.

When I revisit these advertisements 16 years after they appeared, they smack of the FPF factor. I wonder what our nuclear power status has achieved for us.

The country has spent trillions of rupees (we will never know the exact amount) on developing our nuclear weapons, expanding and improving them and then protecting them from falling into the wrong hands. While doing this we neglected our human resources whose security and prosperity the ads so foolishly promised. Although the rich have grown richer, the poor are poorer today — 60pc of the people live below the poverty line.

Above all, the sovereignty and self-reliance we boasted of in 1998 are nowhere in evidence. As for national security and defence, we are still a ‘sovereign state’ and not under Indian occupation — our greatest fear. But is that a consolation, especially when there is a strong belief that we could have remained an independent state had we adopted a foreign policy that sought friendly ties with India and not atom bombs?

In the bargain we have given sanctuary to terrorists and militants of all shades and ethnicity. Be it Al Qaeda or the Taliban or the numerous Lashkars, these groups rampage our country robbing people of their sense of security. While we fear our own people who kill with impunity, we also have to bow before outsiders who now dictate their terms to us. They literally decide how we are to live and how we are to die.

What use are our nuclear weapons when we cannot feed our children, give them education and healthcare? As they die of malnutrition, measles and other preventable childhood diseases we are paving the way for a nation of children crippled by polio because we could not give them polio drops and ensure clean water, the more effective way of wiping out this scourge.

Why do we have to submit to outsiders when we claim to be a sovereign nation secured by nuclear weapons? Remember those ads?

www.zubeidamustafa.com

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2014