The sight of water all around in the current monsoon reminded me of a walk and conversation I had with one of my politician friends some years ago. I was staying in Mayfair, London. He was somewhere in East London doing some odd job in his years of exile. We decided to meet on Sunday. I received him outside the Green Park Station. He suggested that to see London life, we would go to the Covent Garden, a shopping and entertainment hub, which was more or less like the Bhati Gate of Lahore. We reached Piccadilly Circus and started walking leisurely towards Covent Garden. On the way we saw a policewoman, an unusual sight, because one would rarely notice the presence of police on the streets. We stopped and I asked her how long it would take us to reach Covent Garden. She, with a half smile, said; “Ten minutes for me but the way you walk it would take you twenty minutes”. Amused, we thanked her and moved ahead. Her intelligent response impressed us. If it were a policeman in Lahore he would have said “neray e hai (it’s close by)”. He wouldn’t have bothered to know the difference between a brisk walk and a saunter while responding to our query. Lazy mind or the quality of training? Or both?

Intelligence has never been a strong point of Punjab Police, which was established by the colonialists not to serve the people but to suppress them with a heavy hand. Its traditional practice hasn’t changed a bit. The weather was pleasant and a light drizzle was falling. “Look, it’s rainy but there is no rainwater on the pavement and the road. How well they manage it despite the fact that it rarely stops raining here. Maybe the weather helps to keep things clean. Our dry and hot weather makes our roads dusty and dirty,” I said. “No,” he replied. “If we had a similar weather, there would always be muddy water and sludge everywhere. It’s planning, my dear, that makes the difference”. The gentleman is now a member of the current regime but muddy water and sludge in our cities don’t bother him nor does the lack of planning.

Planning is no doubt a creative product of the human mind. It’s an ability to visualise the future and make imaginative constructions to deal with what it may possibly offer. Such a quality is not restricted to a particular race or region. It’s a latent quality of the human mind which evolved over eons and is shared by all human groups on this planet. How each group plans or tries to plan depends on its historical conditions and subsequently, its social and intellectual development. The West hasn’t always been the way it is now. The Middle East, North Africa, China and the Indian subcontinent were far ahead of it economically, socially and intellectually when Europe suffered from the miasma of the Dark Ages. How the West’s backwardness, misery and poverty provided an impetus for transformation is a worth reading story narrated by serious scholars. Its opposite happened in our part of the world; how we became enslaved and wretched despite all our riches.

In the subcontinent, caste-based hierarchy has been one of the main stumbling blocks in the way of individual and social development. Humans are first divided into immutable groups and activities of each group are regulated within defined parameters, which hamper the emergence of shareable social vision. That’s why a peasant, for example, would not take up arms against an invading army in the subcontinent. Ideology dictated that his job was not to fight. It was left to some other group to bear arms and fight which invariably lost battles and wars because of its exclusive caste-based composition. The history of how easily the East India Company, a trading entity, overwhelmed the rich Indian states is a cautionary tale.

Another factor that shaped our mass psyche is rooted in the historical relationship our people had with the state. The state, whatever its form, had a predatory nature; it extracted as much as possible from the people to the benefit of ruling cliques. People were subjects, not citizens. Thus nothing was done to develop human resources. People were treated as an essential but expendable commodity at the same time; a new wave of people would replace the receding one. People on their part looked at the state with deep suspicions which mostly acted as a hostile entity.

The colonial occupation introduced us to the notion of nation state which the old caste elites and newly-created lackey upper class employed as a propaganda tool, a rallying point to consolidate their grip on power in the post-colonial period while perpetuating the practices of pre-modern quasi-feudal set-up. They hardly invest in human development. Human development includes economic, political, social and cultural dimensions. Investment in human development produces, what one may say, evolved individuals with a rounded social vision. But that’s only possible if the state represents the people and its interests, and treats them as citizens who can hold it accountable for what it does. Sadly, in our part of the world, the state acts like a crude tyrant with a whip in hand to lash the people literally and metaphorically. But then it expects them to be not lacking in things that make a sustainable modern state.

“The fruit tree that bears no fruit is called sterile / Who examines the soil? / The branch that breaks is called rotten / but wasn’t there snow on it?,” is the question posed by poet Brecht. Elders say; “jinna gur pao, ona mitha (sweetness would be proportional to the amount of gur you put in your bowl”. What kind of citizens there would be depends on how much the state invests in individuals. What we have these days is garbage in, garbage out. That’s why we can’t have the likes of policewoman we met in London. That’s why we can’t keep our streets and bazaars clean. That’s why we can’t manage to store and use the water the monsoon unleashes every year. That’s why we can’t be what we potentially are, humans with the ability to change our present and plan our future.

— soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2025