Turmoil ahead

In the last State of the Union address of his second term as US president, Barack Hussein Obama prognosticated, “Instability will continue for decades in many parts of the world…Some of these places may become safe havens for new terrorist networks, others will fall victim to ethnic conflict, or famine, feeding the next wave of refugees.” Pakistan was prominently listed by Obama as one of the countries expected to experience continuing turmoil in the decades ahead.
This should not be a surprising prediction. After all, our green-flagged ‘land of the pure’ has never really known any extended periods of halcyon peace and harmony. Ours has in fact continually been an exceptionally violent country to live in. This is a fact that has to be faced, uncritical patriotism notwithstanding.
Violence, it seems, is the Pakistani way. Here, unrequited lovers throw acid on the erstwhile objects of their passions. Friends quarrelling over a meal at a teashop end up shooting one another. On television, one heard two bearded gentlemen debating which particular transgressions would render a person liable to be murdered. My goodness! Such a preoccupation with killing, revenge and violence. One would think that men whose business it is to study the word of God would speak to us about His mercy, His benedictions and His infinite love.
So, it is about Islam, right? Or, rather, about the twisted pseudo-Islamist narrative being promoted since the days of the satanic usurper Ziaul Haq? Alas, if only it were that simple! The point is that these violent attitudes, which have become almost a defining feature of the Pakistani mindset, had beginnings even prior to the emergence of the Taliban or of Zia.
Start at the very beginning, with the cycles of violence and counter-violence that accompanied partition, most notably in Punjab. The new nation state of Pakistan was born with the forcible eviction of over 12 million people both ways and an extraordinary spasm of violence that left over a million dead. Is it possible to erase or to read unmoved Amrita Pritam’s memorable invocation to Waris Shah?
“Ik roi si dhi Punjab di, toon likh likh maray vain
Uj lakhan Heeran rondiyan, tainoon Waris Shah noon kain.”
(A daughter of Punjab cried, and you wrote reams of lament
Today thousands of Heers lament, beseeching you Waris Shah.)
Yes, that is how our national history began.A quarter of a century then jolted along, through two wars (1948 and 1965) and four coups d’etat (Ghulam Mohammad, Mirza, Ayub, Yahya), climaxing in the 1971 military massacre in Dacca, which triggered a civil war, a third war with India, another 10 million refugees, another million dead, an alleged 100,000 rape pregnancies, and the further division of the land. After 1971, there were yet another four coups d’etat: Bhutto, Zia, Musharraf and Musharraf again.
Let us look particularly at the regime that began its career in July 1977, that of Ziaul Haq. This illegitimate and unrepentantly evil regime (in which, as a matter of record, both former Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and present Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif served) unleashed a series of scourges upon the land: heroin, the Kalashnikov culture, reactionary perversion of the legal and penal systems, violent religious bigotry, the eclipse of humane discourse, extremism, sectarian violence and ethnic violence. The Zia years also saw Pakistan initiate the war in Afghanistan, now the longest running armed conflict since the Hundred Years War in the 14th century.
Worse, this war to save Zia fanned international terrorism as well as the suicide bombings and religion-based militancy that have swept across our land. And have now swept across much of the world.
Alongside all this, we have suffered multiple political assassinations: Liaquat Ali Khan, Dr Khan Sahib, Hayat Sherpao, Abdul Samad Achakzai, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Shahnawaz Bhutto, Ziaul Haq, Ghulam Haider Wyne, Azim Tariq, Hakim Saeed, Murtaza Bhutto, Akbar Bugti, Benazir Bhutto, Imran Farooq, SalmaanTaseer, Shahbaz Bhatti, not to mention the murder of journalists like Mohammed Salahuddin, Daniel Pearl, Hayatullah Khan, Musa Khankhel, Wali Babar, Saleem Shahzad, Murtaza Razvi,or the 132 schoolchildren and nine teachers massacred at the Army Public School (APS) Peshawar, or the killing of civil society personalities like Zahira Shahid Hussain, Parween Rahman, Sabin Mahmud, or the deadly attacks on Hamid Mir, MalalaYousafzai, Kainat Rizvi, Debra Lobo. The list goes on and on.
Where does one begin to grieve? The daily toll of the dead and the missing in Balochistan? In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa? The 5,000 brave soldiers killed in battle against the treacherous insurgents of the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) and its fellow travellers? The 50,000 Pakistani men, women and children murdered by terrorists? Where will the grieving end? This is a nation born in violence and which continues to remain in a state of violence.
Ours is the kind of body politic where no prime minister has yet completed a full term, where, in one regime, the apex court was attacked by rowdies and where, in another, the Chief Justice (CJ) was physically manhandled and beaten.Ours, it seems, is a culture of hyper-machoposturing at all levels and amongst all categories of persons. These are the purportedly manly values that have been drilled into us, perhaps since the days of the ‘martial race’ claptrap of the British Raj. The continuous florescence of violence here is the result of our history of false narratives and fantasy identities.
In his interesting study The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience, the French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot suggests that certain sets of conditions at the time of the country’s birth have over-determined its trajectory. He identifies three tensions that have set in motion the processes making for our continued instability and turmoil. The first of these is the tension between the centralising impetus of the federal government and the nationalistic sentiments of the various linguistic ethnicities. The second tension comprises the stresses generated by the tussle for power between the iron frame of administration run by a civil-military bureaucratic oligarchy on the one hand, and, on the other, democratic political forces seeking a redistribution of power. The third tension is the sharp contradiction between our traditionally inclusive religious culture, which certainly guided the vision of the nation’s founders, and the rigid conformism of what one could call the clerical bureaucracy.
The fact is that, very early on in our history, the reactionary ideas of the clerical bureaucracy were adopted by the centrist civil-military establishment to plaster over and conceal the reality of a grossly skewed distribution of power and wealth. Is there a way forward and away from these deadly tensions? Yes: come clean. Tell the truth about all those murders, those pointless wars and the origins of the bigotry, intolerance and violence that have more and more become a Pakistani characteristic. Tell the truth. For once.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in
Karachi. He is also a poet