Daily Times

It is funny how some buzzwords manage to be ever-present and yet escape our cognitive radars. We hear such words all the time but never stop to think twice about the implications or their meaning. One such word that Pakistanis love to throw around is ‘crisis’. Crisis this, crisis that; at every turn, we are led to believe that we are in a crisis. In print and electronic media, inside households and out on the streets, no matter where you look, you will find crises being discussed.

There is certainly some truth to the assertion that we are in crisis, and we have been in such a state for a long time. One after the other, we have seen various sectors of the economy and society fail to pay heed to the rot and, as a result, collapse on an intermittent basis. Even though an abject failure of the system has been kept at bay till now, we however cannot be sure that such a disaster can be averted entirely. As a matter of fact, it only takes a small nudge for any country in crisis to be tipped over to the failed state side of the scales. The argument that Pakistan is too big and too important to fail has stopped us from reflecting on our shortcomings so far, but something needs to be done if we are to avert an ‘omni-crisis’.

We started out on our crisis trail all the way back in 1947 with our very own identity crisis. After centuries of cohabitation among different religious groups in the subcontinent, Pakistan was carved out to house the majority Muslim populations in certain territorial zones. But how would one go about defining the bounds of inclusion when such a state was never addressed head on? As a result, even after decades of existing as a legitimate and separate entity, we cannot quite agree on who belongs in the Islamic Republic and who does not. That identity crisis has been the progenitor of other political crises as well, like the one that led to the secession of the east wing as independent Bangladesh in 1971.

Moreover, after independence, other crises came to the fore as well but the exact chronology of events is a little murky to be honest. Whether bad politics led to bad governance or vice versa is a question for the ages, but the fact remains that administrative failures of various sorts combined with lack of visionary leadership did cripple us enough to never fully recover. As a first and last resort we have always veered towards providing stopgap solutions to stem the flow, but such antics can only take us so far, as we are so painfully finding out in contemporary times.

In the 1960s and 1970s economic crisis was the talk of the town. Segmented industrial growth throughout the 1960s led to alienation of the masses later on. Consequently, nationalist policies were introduced to soothe the aggrieved but before we could really assess the impact of such policies, we found ourselves smack in the midst of a bigger political and identity crisis in the 1970s, the reverberations of which we are still feeling today. In this way, by the early 2000s, we had already been introduced to enough crises to last a lifetime, but then came the service delivery crises. In the first wave, the nationwide electricity brownouts started happening. A lot of blame was thrown around and a lot of electoral promises were made but the problem still persists. If that were not enough, a country supposedly loaded with gas reserves started experiencing gas outages as well and, again, stopgap measures like suspending gas supply to industrial units were made, which in turn conjured up the industrial crisis. The latest in this ceaseless barrage of crises is the petrol crisis, where petroleum products have become rare in the bustling cities across most of Punjab. And, all along, we have been in a health crisis, an education crisis and all the other possible combinations of the word with the same suffix. And, lest you forget, let me remind you that we have been in a security crisis for the past decade or so already.

However, do you want to know what is worse than what we are going through right now? It is the realisation that things are only going to go downhill from here. Not only are the current crises going to spiral out of control if not tackled immediately, we are going to soon be adding new crises to our repertoire as well. So, by 2017, lack of access to clean water is going to be a major issue in Pakistan. By 2020, energy deficiency would already have taken us back to the Stone Age — this time without any help — and, by 2035, climate change will severely impede our ability to fend for and feed ourselves. But who can we blame? The politicians and administrators certainly come to mind but, to a certain extent, we ourselves are to blame as well. Not just for ignoring the tough questions but also for failing to forget about our personal differences and get together for a cause. If our behaviour in the current times is any indication, I strongly believe that our greed will be our own undoing in the end.

Another aspect of being the crisis capital is that, in times like these, defending the liberal-democratic imperatives of government becomes a most difficult proposition. In fact, history does bear witness to the fact that military rule has fared well for Pakistan compared to democratic interludes, since improvements in governance, reduction in corruption and economic growth are all synonymous with the advent of martial law. When politicians fail to alleviate the grievances of the electorate, we start looking for saviours in other places. And with the crises morphing into the dreaded failed state quite rapidly, the spectre of the khaki uniform is looming large over Pakistan once again. But, despair not; if the correlation between martial law and improvement in quality of life is indeed strong, then there might be a way out of this current crisis, and that too soon.

The author is a freelance columnist with degrees in political science and international relations