Stagnation of political sphere
5
A FEW weeks ago, my father, who often catches up on news programmes he has missed via YouTube, began to watch one such show. Almost 15 minutes into the programme he realised it was not a show from this February in 2022 but from February 2020. I would venture to say that many Pakistanis could be fooled in this way — imagining a show from last year to be from this year and vice versa.
The reason is simple. An acute and pernicious sort of stagnation afflicts national and provincial politics in Pakistan. A very tired cast of characters performs the same roles with a sort of farcical tedium. Some characters show regular outrage, anger at this or that bit of news. When the original characters tire, their progeny stand at the ready. They wear nicer clothes, perhaps even better accessories, but act out the same content, their opponents and them having worked out playing king and challenger in turn.
In recent months, the population has been absorbed by the episodic inclusion of grand weddings where bride and groom and guests and parents wear clothes whose collective cost could feed several small villages in the country. The population, its collective brain dulled and addled with the routine consumption of such gunk, looks on and affords these proud looters ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. No one expects anything better any longer and if there were anything better, perhaps they would not know how to welcome it. Here in Pakistan, it is only the looters of the country’s coffers who are used to nice things. The rest of us have only ‘likes’.
There is systemic rot in this. It is not the matter of one or two political parties and the administrations that they have led. At the moment, the two largest political parties in Pakistan do not hold party elections. Party leadership is thus concentrated in the hands of a few. Instead of being ashamed of this state of affairs, it is touted as a kind of consensus in which allegedly everyone agrees. Such is the state of tight familial control that even during elections, it seems unlikely that anyone other than the progeny of the dynastic leaders would be elected.
No one expects anything better any longer and if there were anything better, perhaps they would not know how to welcome it.
One cannot blame only the parties for this disaster. As the people, so the parties and so eventually the polity. Pakistan still functions along the primitive lines of familial relationships, clan contacts and tribal constructs. No one is at all embarrassed about nepotism; in fact, they are befuddled when you suggest that they should be embarrassed at having installed their sons and cousins and daughters-in-law and nieces in various government posts. Naturally, this means that everyone is complicit; if you expect to be leading your father’s business, then why should you be surprised if a prime minister’s son expects to be prime minister? It must be noted that most national political parties do not hold internal elections. Party workers and various operatives are informed of party direction and policy by directives they receive by email.
The consequence of these festering sores on the nation’s ignored innards is that there is no real possibility of change. When talented individuals do not see any means of progressing based on their merit, naturally they leave. This is what happens to Pakistan’s talented people, who not only migrate but whose successes abroad reveal how much they could have contributed to their own country had there been any effort at all to keep them back. Migration is an existential wound, a lifelong burden, but it is better than to watch all the uncle’s sons and all the industrialist’s daughters being installed in all the prime spots. As for the country itself, it is quite happy with taking bites of its exported labour’s chocolate bars. One of Pakistan’s biggest ‘products’ is the foreign worker, who sends home remittances.
There are some recognitions of this state of stagnation. Not very long ago, the stalwarts in the Sindh Assembly managed to revive a law that would allow for the formation of student unions in the public universities of the province. This revival, which takes place a long 38 years after student unions were banned by Gen Ziaul Haq’s military regime, is a recognition of how political talent must be cultivated. The revival of student unions means opportunities for students to debate, to learn civil discourse and to understand how their own and other people’s political identities develop.
In ideal circumstances, this could possibly remedy what I am lamenting about in this column: the absolute absence of new and promising political talent in the country. The dark side of this is just what you would expect it to be, that if there was such a rising talent it would be considered a threat to the present system of ossified leadership that is so invested in keeping things just as they are and just as it appears they always will be.
In a recent clip circulating on social media, a well-known woman political leader attended the wedding of a young woman who also had a party ticket. The latter is one of the youngest politicians in Pakistan, but the video revealed just how much she must kowtow to a member of the dynasty to keep the seat that has been bestowed upon her. Most Pakistanis would not even recognise why the clip is something lamentable, so used are they to the fact that dynastic rulers deserve obeisance and that individual politicians must be indebted to them rather than to (gasp) the Pakistani people who elected them. This is a tragedy; if we cannot change things perhaps we can at least recognise that there is a desperate and urgent need for change.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, February 23rd, 2022
