THE people of Pakistan, or such of them as are foolish enough to take some interest in national affairs, would gladly leave the recent saga of foolishness and humiliation behind them and get on with life. But only if their betters would let them.
Not a day goes by without a fresh utterance to test the nation's patience. Occupied Kashmir is soon going to be ours (Nawaz Sharif). India will be forced to the negotiating table (Nawaz Sharif). When the armed forces and the people are one no harm can come to Pakistan (General Musharraf). There are then the information and foreign ministries which can be trusted to come up with their own absurdities. The only person who has stopped being inventive is Ishaq Dar who keeps saying that fresh taxes will not burden the common man.
After the nuclear tests last year the nation was informed that the PM's secretariat, an enduring monument to our aesthetic sensibility, was to be vacated for reasons of austerity. Now it transpires that it is to be re-occupied. To show the government's love for the Northern Areas, the cabinet is slated to meet in Skardu. Then it is announced that after all it will meet in Islamabad.
Amidst this hectic activity the prime minister decrees the construction of a new state guest house at Bhurban, Murree. In Lahore he inspects the model of the new airport terminal, whose outlines resemble the mock-Mughal facade of the PM's secretariat, and orders that it be completed by next year. Meanwhile, in the name of road development, the vandalization of Lahore continues, with age-old trees being pulled down and ever wider malls being built to accommodate the traffic sense peculiar to this country.
Things have been brought to such a pass that ordinary people (as opposed to drawing room literati) are past caring. Weary of sights and sounds which keep recurring like scenes from a bad dream, and their last illusions lying broken and scattered over the landscape, they are past caring and, to the government's infinite joy, past protesting. Burning tyres, erecting barricades and braving police lathis after all are functions of hope, vigour and enthusiasm. When from the body-politic these vital qualities are drained, from whence should arise the spirit of protesting?
The people of Pakistan have tried everything: repeated dictatorships, experiments with different brands of democracy, the rise and fall of Benazir, the glittering summits of the heavy mandate. They have raised monuments to the Chaghi hills, hailed Dr A.Q. Khan as their deliverer and believed with all the fervour of their emotional souls that the defence of the country had become impregnable. The lies and absurdities they have put up with would have caused an upheaval in any country similarly placed. But their stamina for more experiments now lies exhausted.
It is a strange country indeed where a ghost from the past such as Roedad Khan should emerge from the mists to preach, of all things, a revolution. Every despotic regime in recent memory he faithfully served. The burden of the infamies then gathered by the country he valiantly bore but the infamy of Kargil has cut him to the quick and made him write a frenzied piece in the News with gems such as this: "What a terrible burden of guilt our rulers bear. One day this treachery shall be avenged and out of all this would come the politics of the future." He goes on to ask, "Who will light a candle in the gloom of our morale?" The answer should be obvious: another Zia-ul-Haq with Roedad Khan as his secretary-general of the interior.
An invaluable insight into the intellectual calibre of our governing classes is afforded by the spate of memoirs to have come out in recent years. While not a few of them are badly written, virtually all of them are self-serving, making their writers out to be infallible individuals who held aloft the banner of rectitude while everything around them was collapsing. In some cases, it is true, these writings are a useful addition to the historical record but the reader who might be looking for any traces of grace, modesty or humanity in them is likely to be disappointed.
If such be the state of the brightest and heaviest stars in the national firmament, of what account are Nawaz Sharif's reputed limitations? He has been false to no one, least of all to the masses who put their trust in him. The foolishness was that of the masses if they saw wonders in him which never existed.
Endlessly restless and therefore flitting from here to there, fascinated with gewgaws and gimmicks, believing that somewhere through the woods lies a golden short-cut which if discovered would turn the burden of governance into a perpetual holiday, are vintage Nawaz Sharif traits which at least the members of Pakistan's permanent politburo (Roedad Khan being an erstwhile member of this club) should have fully known when they went about creating him as a counter-weight to Benazir Bhutto. But they were blinded by their prejudices, hating Benazir more for being her father's daughter and less for her presumed failings.
Indeed when it was discovered that Benazir was quite unlike her father and that her reigning passion was to feather her nest rather than to rock the national boat, many of the politburo members who had earlier thought her to be the very personification of fickleness and evil gladly took up service under her. The history of Pakistan is replete with such ironies.
It is also instructive to remember that while Benazir cut her populist moorings and became a child of the civil-military establishment, Nawaz Sharif moved in the opposite direction. From being a creation of the establishment he became his own man, especially after his falling out with President Ishaq Khan in 1993. In other words, he freed himself from the clutches of the English-speaking establishment and successfully created a Punjabi or a desi mass constituency for himself which ultimately culminated in the heavy mandate of 1997.
The tragedy is that while the intellectual and moral calibre of the English-speaking governing classes was always low, that of the desi crowd which has assaulted Islamabad on the strength of the heavy mandate is even lower. Between them Pakistan's goose is being cooked.
Seen in this perspective, Kargil was not an aberration which occurred suddenly, out of the blue, because of someone's folly or a momentary lapse of judgment. The manner we lurched into it, unthinkingly and on the basis of a set of false assumptions, reflected the intellectual bankruptcy which holds sway in our corridors of power. The attendance at Clinton's court put the spotlight on our moral bankruptcy.
The point to note is that both these qualities did not develop overnight. They are rooted in the ethos and temper of our ruling classes.