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BIRTHDAYS come and go and so it was with Pakistan’s 69th year — another 12 months gone by amid the pull and push of political wrangling, the want and need of the flood-ravaged and the drought-stricken. There was the ongoing burden of terror, of disappeared children and women killed; people were shocked, and then they shrugged.
Somehow, in a country of want and need, there was enough to light up buildings, organise parades, and string up flags. It is the nature of birthdays, individual and national, that the arrival of the day is itself a cause for celebration. And so this past Sunday, there was celebration, of the usual kind — the birth stories retold, the distance from them assessed. The glum who think the present lacking stayed quiet, and everyone else justified their small excesses of food or rest or expenditure in the name of the collective celebratory spirit.
It is perhaps because of its very given-ness, its regular, unerring arrival every year, that we do not pause to consider for very long the meaning or import of the ‘independence’ portion of Independence Day. Existence, we assume, equals independence, and at that part of the equation, we stop, pause and look away.
If we were to turn around, however, we would find a glum reality awaiting us: over the decades, Pakistan’s reliance on foreign aid has refused to go away. This fact underscores how roles for Pakistani politicians are constructed around this centrepiece of keeping the money flowing. When Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Saudi Arabia earlier this year, he came back with a $122m aid package. When trillions are required, every penny counts and some pennies, such as the size of the aid packages the US gives to Pakistan, count a lot. Whatever those who have never been prime minister might say, the job of past and present prime ministers requires ensuring that the money keeps coming.
When the fuel to run the country comes from elsewhere — and money is fuel indeed — then it follows that the ways in which it is used is often dictated by others. This creates its own relationship with avarice of another kind, a dependence on creative accounting, the sly sneaking and squirrelling away that is necessary to do the things that need being done.
When the fuel to run the country comes from elsewhere, the ways in which it is used is often dictated by others.
Since political power even in aid-dependent countries is largely the function of patronage and favours, these too must be paid for. When a lot of the money that is made by the country is largely aid money, it follows that these costs of power are financed by money meant for disaster relief, poverty alleviation, literacy programmes and vaccination programmes. The US is unlikely to fund any politician’s request titled ‘paying political favours that brought me to power’ or ‘post-power exile fund’ and neither is Saudi Arabia.
Those are, of course, the matters of state, always complicated and the outcome of intrigue and subterfuge.
However, what exists at the national level in Pakistan is replicated at the individual level. Just as the prime minister kowtows to foreign, greater, richer others, so too Pakistani society operates on the principle of stubborn, unrelenting clumps of dependent relationships. Unlike the charts and numbers of foreign aid-bound constraints, these cannot be unravelled or tabulated with as much ease or clarity. They exist nevertheless, emotional, physical and financial dependencies cultivated by the weak against the slightly weaker, the prettier sister, the smarter brother, the richer cousin all enacting petty acts of vengeance via which the US House of Representatives holds Pakistan’s millions hostage.
A state that looks outwards and must please external others cannot, with any reliability, come to its own aid. As a consequence, Pakistan and Pakistanis remain cornered in the primal basis of organisation that is the family, and consequently its petty power struggles. This involves always prioritising the needs of related others, those that one expects to beg and borrow from in the event of lost jobs and sudden illnesses.
It does not matter if your aunts are ruthless, their cruelties numerous and well hidden; they can continue, year after year, to extract the pounds of flesh, force on their dependents the bitter draught of humiliation and abjection. Big decisions invoke big debts and big payoffs, so marriages and inheritances are all devised and divvied up according to the tangled web that must strangle, connect and constrain all at the same time. One is left alive, and that in itself is supposed to indicate a victory, cards and cakes, each with a cost far greater than the price of their ingredients.
If the descriptions above reflect even in an incidental or approximate sense the current state of national and individual realities, then it bears reflecting on that every now and then Pakistan and Pakistanis must consider celebrating dependence days with just as much fervour as Independence Day. However we may like to spin it — the nearly 70 years of our existence have not permitted any real actualisation of the sort of autonomy or sovereignty that is implied by independence.
In the tradition of the weak and wanting but relatively newly liberated, of course, independence days must be given their due. An argument for the celebration of dependence days, of constraint and subjection, the lack of autonomy and the want of sovereignty, is simply a suggestion to balance the scales between what is imagined and what is in fact real.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2016
