ONE of the charges against Boris Johnson and his Tories in the Partygate was that they showed “a lack of respect” for the security and cleaning staff at parties held at 10 Downing Street and other government buildings. Other misdemeanours included a violation of Covid SOPs at a time when a lockdown was on.

While nobody in Pakistan — not even the worst and the most asinine enemy of a given politician — would approach a government/state institution for action for a violation of Covid SOPs, the British police took notice of these parties and issued what we in Pakistan would call challans to over 80 people, including the prime minister, his wife and the finance minister. All of them paid the fines. Many people, including the Downing Street press secretary, later resigned.

What lessons can we draw from Partygate? By our standards it was no ‘gate’ at all, and the scandal, if at all we can call it so, is now behind the British prime minister, who has won a vote of confidence to ensure his party leadership for at least a year.

As for this “lack of respect” for the security and cleaning staff, for us in a South Asia steeped in the caste system this is no misdemeanour. Yes, the caste system isn’t confined to Hindu society, and whatever Muslims may have learnt from Hindus over a thousand years of interaction, the willing embrace of the caste system was indeed part of it. This caste menace didn’t come with us from the Middle East or Central Asia; we discovered it here in the subcontinent, and the ruling Turco-Persianate elite and the Muslim middle class found it useful. Today, for all practical purposes, Pakistani society is caste-ridden if you look at how you treat ‘sweepers’ at your home and workplace.

The economic crisis we are passing through is the result of moral bankruptcy.

What constitutes a scandal in Pakistan? Most certainly not Covid SOP violations and dinner parties where chicken biryani and sherbets of all sorts are served. For us, a scandal must mean money laundering worth millions of dollars, misappropriation of official funds, illegal appointments, allotment and occupation of government land by bending or bypassing the rules, constructing buildings that collapse while people live there, the recruitment of airline pilots officially declared to be in possession of fake degrees, election manipulation and constitutional frauds. Nothing of the sort happened in Britain; instead, the furore over Partygate underlines for us a shameful reality — the higher level of morality in most of the Western world today. It is not that their values are superior to ours; on the contrary, they and we have a common source: the Judeo-Christian and Islamic texts and traditions with Hellenic underpinning. The difference is that, while the West today conforms to those values in individual and collective lives, our commitment to these values is a mere theory, a publicity stunt.

This moral backwardness in our case reflects itself in material reality and repudiates a belief we often hear in Pakistan — that the West is superior to us only materially and that we need only learn science and technology from the West because morally we are fine. Nothing could be more absurd. A nation or a civilisation cannot be materially superior if it is in moral chaos. A nation and civilisation can only be materially powerful, enlightened, tolerant, and culturally hegemonic as the West is today if it stands on a higher moral pedestal. How moronic thus to equate the West with what we see as moral licentiousness! The truth is that the West has landed a man on the moon; it has fired an intergalactic probe; it has put smartphones in our pockets, and we are dying to land in America, even as illegal immigrants.

The economic crisis Pakistan is passing through is essentially the result of the moral bankrup­tcy we have been suffering from. Imagine that the government of a country whose talented and vibrant middle class is equal to Germany’s population is begging for a few billion dollars to survive. The other day, an American tycoon offered to buy Twitter for $44bn.

In his very readable book, Diversity of Islamic Thought: Coming to Terms, retired Admiral Pervaiz Asghar makes a significant point. Regretting that our clergy and politicians talk of our “spiritual supremacy” and constantly bewail “the moral degradation (uryani) of Western society”, he wonders how they can do so when “all parameters of morality are heavily tilted in the West’s favour […]: openness, pursuit of knowledge, welfare orientation, adherence to truth, ethical behaviour, rule of law, human rights, and adherence to laws of the land”.

Against this background we shouldn’t be surprised if those investigating Partygate found actionable among the prime minister’s guests “a lack of respect” for the security and cleaning staff.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author

Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2022