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I READ the other day that our prime minister was so impressed by the huge Indian flag he saw in New Delhi recently that he has directed the Capital Development Authority to fly a similarly large Pakistani flag in Islamabad.
This banner is to be 541 feet across, and will be hoisted on a 200-foot flagpole. Should we care about this latest exercise in excess? Is bigger better? Just as Dubai built Burj Khalifa, the 2,716-foot building to outdo Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers, so are we now trying to compete with India over the size of our respective flags.
The reality is that leaders with little substance try tinkering with symbols to show they have achieved something. How would a larger flag make any difference to the miserable lives of the vast majority of our citizens?
The PM’s imprint is on many unviable projects.
By now, it is no secret that Nawaz Sharif is a simple, unsophisticated person who sees himself as a latter-day Sher Shah Suri who, in his short reign in the 16th century, built the Grand Trunk Road from Chittagong to Kabul. Rumour has it that when the finance ministry tried to object to one of Nawaz Sharif’s grandiose schemes during his first stint, the advice was shrugged off with the query: “Was Sher Shah Suri asked to maintain fiscal discipline?”
Looking back, Nawaz Sharif’s stints in power have all been marked by large, high-profile projects designed to leave his imprint on Pakistan’s skyline. Never mind that most of them remain financially unviable.
Returning to his latest fixation, perhaps he should remember that it’s not the size of the flag that matters, but what it stands for. When I was a child, I remember being told that the colour green in our flag stood for Pakistan’s Muslim majority, while the white strip on the side represented the minorities. Given the treatment we accord our non-Muslim citizens, perhaps we ought to have an all-green flag.
In the early, heady days of Pakistan, there was much talk of freedom and equality. Indeed, one verse of our heavily-Persianised national anthem reads: “This flag of the crescent and star/ Leads the way to progress and perfection.”
Tell that to the Christian slum-dwellers who live in the shadows of Islamabad’s modern buildings. These unhappy people clean the houses and streets of our capital city, but are treated like untouchables, bereft of rights.
Writing on this page recently, Huma Yusuf documented the foul treatment we accord our minorities, forcing them to seek asylum in distant lands where they are unwanted, and under threat of deportation. But there is little outrage over this constant persecution in our TV studios or campuses.
A flag is supposed to be a symbol of national unity, and yet, over the years, ties to the federation have been growing ever more tenuous. Starting with the brutal civil war that saw the emergence of Bangladesh, the remaining provinces have been voicing their discontent. Balochistan is in a state of virtual insurrection while both urban and rural Sindh have, from time to time, expressed a desire to go their own way. The tribal areas were virtually a state within a state until the ongoing military operation began.
But surely the constituent parts of the federation cannot be held together indefinitely by military force. The glue of religion is clearly not enough to bind them, as we saw in East Pakistan. There needs to be a convergence of interests based on a social pact between citizens and state. Growing numbers of Pakistanis now see their federal government as an embodiment of largely Punjabi aspirations. And Nawaz Sharif and his ruling PML-N are doing little to dispel this notion.
Certainly, symbols matter. For most of us, Urdu, our cricket team and our flag are unifying factors. But over the years, pride in being Pakistani has decreased as our country’s image abroad has become toxic. Our green passports are not something we wish to wave proudly at immigration counters abroad.
But why blame Nawaz Sharif alone? Surely we are all complicit in this decline. When we stick on a number plate on our cars with the legend ‘Bakistan’, we are aping the Arab pronunciation of our country’s name. Why are we trying to reject our South Asian identity which is far richer culturally and historically than anything emerging from the Arabian Peninsula?
As the glue holding the federation together weakens, the army’s unifying role is strengthened. Never mind that it is partly responsible for eroding the underpinnings of a democratic Pakistan: the fact is that increasingly, politicians are being viewed as part of the problem and incapable of being part of the solution.
The current dispiriting scenario of Imran Khan and Maulana Qadri playing their ambitious games while the army is engaged in perhaps its most important battle underlines the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our political class. As long as our leaders don’t get their act together, bigger flags won’t help.
Published in Dawn, July 12th, 2014
