The perils of promises
13
Fifteen years before August 1947, Winston Churchill said: “We have no intention of casting away that most truly bright and precious jewel in the crown of the king, which more than all our other dominions and dependencies constitutes the glory and strength of the British empire.”
We all know how it ended; this almost ides of August we mark the departure of the British and the independence and creation of our very own Pakistan. As they left, the British gathered up all the crowns they had collected from the myriad maharajas and sultans they had encountered during their sojourn of two centuries and went back to their island on the other side of the world. The crowns, literally, they kept and arranged in glass cases in the carpeted rotunda of Windsor Castle, where they remain today, the headgear of Bhopal and Tipu Sultan, the lined-up, once lustrous loot of empire.
Pakistan’s was a special victory, a double rout, a one-up against the British and then a wresting from what had been before empire; a new country whose existence and possibility had been even less likely, less imaginable, than the departure of the British. Imagined first by a poet as he longed for home in the frigid grimness of Europe, Pakistan was a promise, a just-realised possibility whose allure lay in its emptiness.
Pakistan’s problem with promise is its addiction to a particular stage of political existence
Progressive writers, caught up in the feverish euphoria of the subcontinent’s grandest anti-colonial moment, imagined it as a host for their literary aspirations, political leaders as a playground for ideological innovation, a deftly devised polity of democracy and faith leavened by linguistic and cultural diversity. Those that had the least, who loaded up their oxcarts and left behind their fields, who rolled up their bedrolls and remained undeterred by the unknown, had their own dreams — idyllic recreational patchworks of prosperity and new community, hopefully created.
Because Pakistan had just recently graduated from possibility to reality, it could hold them all, these vastly varied dreams of a perfect homeland, all fit into the receptacle of its newly created borders. Pakistan was a promise and in its unrealised capacities everyone could believe.
So many of our current wars and vagaries are due to the collisions of these varied promises, all of whom existed together for a time but have now decided against cohabitation. There are the promises of constitutions past, pushing and shoving at the content of amendments present. There are the memories of one vision of the nation, promoted by the sayings and writings and remembrances of leaders past and the competing recollections of others also bolstered by bits and pieces of the past.
One by one, those that lived then, when the magic moment of creation happened, are being taken away by time; and with them go the empirical truths of what was said, what little was certain, and what was meant to be. In its wake, Pakistan is today a battleground of varied dreams, a warzone of parallel promises, each of which yearns for fulfilment.
The problem, however, is not simply the competing content of promises differently remembered, or even the grisly contest of irreconcilable visions. A nation built on promises is not a problem; indeed, every nation, even those that count themselves as the strongest, most cohesive and dominant of our contemporary times, can claim that germ as the first act of creation. With crowds gathered in the streets, cities sealed and marches pledged on the eve of its 67th birthday, Pakistan’s problem with promise is not its inability to decide which ones it wants fulfilled.
Instead, it is an addiction to a particular stage of political existence, the point of promise at which anything is possible, nothing is certain, and passion determines everything. The rage in the streets, the brokenness of justice, the incredible allure of a different future attached to a new promise thus tempts and taints each time.
As Pakistanis, we can believe in promises but we cannot live through the pain of their realisation, the mediocrity of the path that must be taken to fruition, the banalities that ensue after the fervour subsides. Even the content of the commitment does not seem to matter, for with every crisis — and there are so many and so frequent — a crowd of diehards appears, its faith invested, its flags raised for the most recent promise for something new.
It is not, then, a contest of promises, a rout to see whether it will be the military or the civilian leadership, the few secularists or the many populists. The question is not one of who will define the future but that as a country Pakistan will remain addicted to the possibility that is promised, yet never have the patience or perseverance to see a vision — any vision — realised.
Behind us, in the 67 years that have gone before, lies the collective carnage, the discarded detritus of promises past. In front of us are the promises we accept today but will no longer be able to tolerate tomorrow.
A move towards political maturity requires patience and process, and in Pakistan’s promise-filled present and promise-filled past neither seems to be forthcoming.
The 67th birthday, like the 66th that came before and the 68th that will come after, will bring the passion and tumult of upheaval, a call to believe in one man’s vision and to join another man’s march. The rulers of the present will thwart the rulers of the future, each detailing the real ills and travails of a country stuck in a single stage of existence, unwilling to grow, earn, work, or live out the promises it sentences to yesterday.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, Aug 13th, 2014
