Daily Times

The main opposition’s, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Senator Rehman Malik stirred fresh controversy in this current, perilous, political situation in the country when he and another member of the National Assembly, Dr Ramesh Kumar Wakwani, kept a domestic flight waiting and arrived hours late for boarding. After facing a reported delay of two and a half hours, the passengers of an Islamabad-bound PIA flight from Karachi hurled abuse and cursed VIP culture with calls of “shame” and booed the lawmakers off the plane. Rather than taking a stand, the PIA spokesperson came to the defence of the elite and issued a statement that the delay in the flight was due to a technical issue and not the fault of Rehman Malik. The questions do arise: why should they get away and who will hold them accountable for their misdemeanours? In a society that is so deeply polarised along both class and status, no one has the courage to question this reckless behaviour and I fail to imagine any one minister or politician would have the temerity and the access to do so. It is sad to admit but we are the slaves of slaves.

This is the mentality and perverted attitude of some of the political leaders in Pakistan and it is not about the rudeness of passengers and crew but the suppressed anger that is bursting to evolve into a tsunami of revenge and justice. It is about being influential, and the privileged, callous and self-centred attitude that comes with it. It is pathological and something I have always wondered about. Why do the corrupt and infamous have so much and what does this entitlement do to their minds that they always want more? And I realised that individuals with narcissistic personality disorder generally believe that the world revolves around them. They display arrogant behaviour, they have a lack of empathy for other people and they crave a need for admiration, all of which must be consistently evident at work and in relationships. They are manipulative, demanding and convinced that they deserve special treatment. This somewhat fatal combination has acquired the status of a living truth in Pakistan’s divided society and it is seldom questioned. The behaviour of the well connected is taken as just that, and the oft-cited refrain is: “What could I have done to stop this on my own?”

Why do those who have so much power want more? Why do they behave so unsympathetically towards their fellow countrymen and why is their abnormal behaviour so widely accepted as ‘normal’? Perhaps the day is not far off when oppression will force its way through, in what we now know as emerging change, and it will cruelly start to look for answers to these questions that politicians have barred the public from examining for 68 years.

Indeed, the ferocious sense of entitlement that the elite carry with them at all times has also helped to legitimise so many inequalities in Pakistan. The indifference and rudeness by Rehman Malik and Ramesh Kumar Wakwani did not surprise me, but those who appreciate him and the PPP and PML-N administration that remained silent against this scandal surprised me. Where does this kind of behaviour come from? You would think if people had more than they need, they would be generous about it and would be seen sharing with others but not so. What power does to people socially and psychologically, their conclusions are telling. For them, wealth is so sutured in with political power, and often to crime without punishment, that they lose all sense of humanity and compassion. Take any recent news in the Pakistan media and it would present undeniable proof of this.

It was encouraging to see that crew and passengers on PIA flight PK370 recorded and succeeded in their protest. Protests are a spontaneous popular movement against tyranny and oppression, and the people of Pakistan want to build a state that respects freedoms and is dominated by a culture where the law is applied equally to everyone. The desire to begin a process of political change is rife and the mob is seeking change that will bring the country out of the crisis of corruption and mafia-ism. Just when the government is deciding how to denounce austerity in its cadres and throngs of young people have taken to the streets of Islamabad in the last month to protest the corrupt, repressive government and its inability to combat corruption, electoral rigging and nepotism, Rehman Malik and his fellow parliamentarian have communicated through social means that you and I can be taken for granted. While it appears that politicians have done little to put out the fires of discontent in the country, this rude and arrogant gesture by politicians has shown how people can use social media to try and bring about meaningful protest in the country.

This is not to deny the poignant force of the protests. Anyone who has ever attended a cricket match or a rock concert knows how much fun it is to be part of a roaring crowd. The experience is extreme and the hallucinatory power of a mass movement is feverish when you are part of the crowd that might change history. It is precisely because of this that the government understands the euphoric power of crowds, and especially because of how they can embolden people cowed by an unjust state that Nawaz Sharif is so determined to prevent Imran’s revolution from spreading.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com