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| Where ideas die | | |
- By Ayaz Amir
Islamabad: It doesn’t hurt to define things clearly. Ours is a diluted, watered-down dictatorship, not a police state as this term is generally understood. But benign or not, it remains a dictatorship leading to all the ills associated with a closed political system. A country like Pakistan with its low educational standards and retarded cultural development is, to begin with, not a very conducive place for the growth of ideas. Even at the best of times there is not much danger of a hundred flowers blooming or a hundred of schools of thought contending for supremacy.
Even so, whatever intellectual spark there may be in such a Sahara of the mind is promptly extinguished when military rule becomes the nation’s destiny. Military leaders do not suffer from an excess of modesty. They think they have all the answers to every problem under the sun. As Pakistanis, however, we are all too familiar with the phenomenon and know from experience that the ideas they bring with them regarding how a society should be run, or how it should be set on the right path, are often frightening in their simplicity.
The script doesn’t vary. The nation is taken hostage and treated to an elementary class in civics. The political class is vilified, the ousted leadership denounced as the source of all evil. It takes some time for the new leadership to become familiar with the ropes of government. When this apprenticeship is over, the nation’s patience is tested by a political or historical narrative which points to a single conclusion: that the new leadership is indispensable. Without it the nation would go astray if not risk outright destruction.
This theory makes every military ruler indispensable: Ayub, Yahya, Zia and now Musharraf. Pakistan must hold some kind of a record for having the highest number of indispensable leaders.
Military rulers flatter themselves by thinking that they bring discipline and élan to national life. Their most eloquent gift to the nation is the retardation of its mind, the impoverishment of national discourse. All discussion is reduced to the single-point agenda of democracy. Other issues are crowded out or put on the back burner.
The time-servers who come flocking round the banner of military rule — not so much out of dire necessity as from the urge to do well by themselves and promote their careers — trumpet the glories of "controlled democracy" and in talking of their military patrons make them sound almost like successors to Caesar and Napoleon.
Just as all military dictators are alike in the rather pedestrian ideas they peddle, all time-servers are also alike in the tunes they sing. Their names change, their vocation of being their masters’ voice remains the same.
Ayub Khan had his Khawaja Shahabuddin and Altaf Gauhar, Yahya his Nawabzada Sher Ali Khan, Zia his Raja Zafar-ul-Haq (who has since undergone a welcome metamorphosis and become a champion of democracy), Musharraf his Sheikh Rashid and now the ever-reliable Muhammad Ali Durrani who has an answer for every occasion. (For the sake of friendship I am missing out several other names that come to mind.)
Musharraf has now been in power for seven years. What has this period meant for the nation? There has been some development of sorts. You see the urban skyline being transformed in some of our larger cities. Karachi, it is true, continues to give a rundown appearance (thanks largely to the MQM’s notions of good governance, the MQM ruling the roost in that unfortunate city) but Lahore and Islamabad, or at least their more favoured parts, are acquiring a "posh" look.
Highrises have come up, roads have been laid, the real estate market has enjoyed a boom, consumer credit for the middle class is easily available, cars clog our roads, cell phone use is on the rise and, as we are endlessly informed, foreign exchange reserves are up.
Of course there is a downside to this development as well. The rich-poor gap has widened and inflation is making life difficult for the less-well-off. But leaving this debate to one side, in other respects the nation hasn’t grown at all. In an intellectual sense, indeed, it seems to have atrophied. Mark how whatever there is of a national discourse revolves only around two subjects, democracy and Islam. The Pakistani landscape seems to have been wiped clean of other issues.
About democracy all the arguments have been repeated and rehearsed so often that there is nothing more to say, at least nothing even remotely original. What the regime’s apologists say in defence of military autocracy is also as old as the hills. What Durrani, the current information minister, says about his patron, Gen. Musharraf, is what Shahabuddin, in essence, used to say about his master, Field Marshal (self-appointed) Ayub Khan.
The history of Pakistan has become a dreary subject. The same chapters are repeated over and over again, usually in much the same language. Small wonder, all books on Pakistan sound the same. They play with a standard set of images and symbols: mosque, mullah, Army, America and now jihad. It is no fault of the writers. The nation is not providing material for a different approach.
From these very symbols it becomes clear that the other subject done to death is Islam. We invoke Islam when we run out of other arguments. We use it as a shield to cover our own inadequacies in the political and economic spheres. The confusion doesn’t spring from Islam. It comes from our failure to build a stable political order based on the rule of law. Confronted with this failure we seek comfort in Islam.
Under the impact of Pakistan’s post-September 11 American alliance, Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Musharraf, has become an apostle of something he calls "enlightened moderation." Pakistan faces an extremist threat. No doubt about it. In the darkest corners of Pakistani society lurk some of the most fervent votaries of jihad. But let’s not forget how this has come about. Past military rulers, with help from the CIA and Saudi Arabia, took pride in turning Pakistan into a nursery of jihad. We are living with the consequences. Musharraf, for his own reasons, is confusing the issue, reluctant to accept the fact that the answer to extremism is not his person or the abstraction of military rule but a return to democracy, no matter how unsteady on its feet that democracy in the beginning may be.
Let us never forget that the Pakistani variant of jihad is a direct product of military adventurism, Gen. Zia being the father of the so-called Afghan jihad. We won’t get rid of jihad and its sympathisers as long as the Army, the ISI and Military Intelligence do not retreat from the political arena and leave governance to the political class.
Of course the political class has more than its share of rogues, charlatans and outright thieves. But so has the military. In any event, the biggest disasters in our history have occurred under military tutelage: the 1965 war, the break-up of Pakistan, jihad and its ramifications, Kargil, playing lackey to American interests. The list is long and singularly tasteless.
Pakistan faces a choice of two competing legacies: civilian and military. Both have been incompetent, the vital difference being that while civilian governments have been incompetent and corrupt, military governments have been that and, as the icing on the cake, disastrous. We should also remember that civilian governments are insecure and vulnerable and therefore relatively easy to remove and replace. But with a military government we are stuck. No matter how incompetent it may be, there’s no easy way to get rid of it. And when it lengthens, as it did under Ayub and Zia and as it now threatens to do under Musharraf, the promise of national fulfilment turns sour and the country becomes a spiritual wasteland, echoing to the sound of empty voices and hollow slogans.
In soil from which all nourishment has been sucked it is foolish to expect anything wholesome to grow.
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