Daily Times

Mohammad Ali Jinnah fought hard to amalgamate Pakistan, and all that he could pull in one loop of a country, he did by virtue of ‘their’ existing vested interests and his supernatural powers of argumentation. Oh yes, his elocution would invite the very envy of Englishmen; Jinnah for one used to read Shakespeare after a 14-hour work day.

This loop consisted of ordinary Muslims who sought refuge from Hindu persecution and British mastery, landlords of Sindh and Balochistan who wanted to eschew the land reforms that a very socialist Nehru promised to India, the very poor Bengalis who would not accept the Congress and later on not accept their very own either.

After a fight for partition, Jinnah finally rested in Ziarat and Liaquat Ali Khan decided to pay him a visit unannounced. “Do you know why they have come?” Jinnah later asked his sister Fatima. When her reply did not hit the mark, Jinnah continued, “They have come to see whether I will live or die.” In fact, a short time after Khan had left, Jinnah said to Dr Bakhsh, “You know, when you first came to Ziarat, I wanted to live. Now, however, it does not matter whether I live or die.”

Hard to believe, but Jinnah indeed had lost power in the last days of his life. Khan went on to change this secular nation into an Islamic Republic via the notorious Objectives Resolution, at the hefty expense of Jinnah’s vision. They had fallen out for good. As Ardeshir Cowasjee pointed out and friend Amina Jilani reminded me, even his historic August 11 speech extracted by a state commissioned biographer Hector Bolitho, cared to eradicate the famous words, “Religion is not the business of the state.” We all must again wonder why.

After Jinnah died and Khan has passed to the fairy meadows, the Bengalis saw their own eastern brethren turn into second generation masters. With all the 22 budding business families in the western hemisphere of Pakistan, Field Marshal Ayub Khan could do little to placate them; the seeds of revolution were sowed in rather fertile grounds. But why was an army man leading a nation that was about to break? Because the partition had developed a self-righteous, increasingly arrogant breed of men who took over the country three times to protect it from itself. As one literature scholar noted, perhaps the only difference between Pakistan’s failure and India success is that the Indian government was never overtaken by a military coup. Why Pakistan? I just wonder why.

But then, if the heavens were not to fall on that, the learned and honoured judiciary joined the lot and fell in love with poetic apologies. On October 19, 1999, Cowasjee was welcomed to a show on Pakistan Television and there the lion lashed out: “Today the judiciary has no respect…the judiciary is corrupt…the government has got a book on all the judges. The higher the judge the lower he is looked down upon.” Much has not changed. Our honoured and most learned Chief Justice would take a suo motu on anything under the sky but has yet to respond to Imran Khan’s plea to reinvestigate polling irregularities in just four constituencies with anything greater than silence. It doesn’t come as a surprise that all the corruption cases involving the PML-N are buried in vaults under the ground while those of the Pakistan’s People’s Party are of national importance. I wonder why they do not employ the concepts of independent and equitable justice. Ex-President Pervez Musharraf, currently under trial for treason, could perhaps throw back a fine reply once his old nemeses are done with him in court.

The army also must be congratulated for creating and nurturing the Taliban. We sent the Taliban to Afghanistan to maim, kill and torture and they did it so well, and certainly did not have enough, that they sent their offshoot breeds to do likewise in Pakistan. Now any Tom, Dick and Harry who loosely looks like a Pathan and has the wish to terrorise can christen a Taliban Chapter X and claim responsibility. They claim their war is against the US but my colleague Najam Ahmed thinks differently: “The Taliban consider themselves to be totally anti-American. They are ready to kill, and die in the process, to rid the world of ‘kafirs’. They have carried out attacks on the Hazara people, attacks on hotels and the list continues. The question is how many attacks have been made on American embassies in the past 12 years by the Taliban?” He is right. Even the massacre on the base of Nanga Parbat targeted Chinese and Ukrainian nationals; the Taliban were greatly indifferent to whether they were Americans or not. I have begun to wonder why.

In totality of the aforementioned, the last 10 years have led to the following national rhetoric (a very tiring one if you will): hate grows on a tree, Israelis own the seed laboratory, the Americans plant it, the Generals fertilise it, the Taliban pluck it, the media sells it. And then there is our white collar party leader, Altaf Bhai, who says he has nothing do with agriculture at all. I continue to wonder why.
a
For a long while, I was a proponent of a civilian revolt but after the Arab Spring, I found how wrong I was. The French, British and the Americans joined in, fuelled one set of civilians against the other, equipped one set of civilians against the other and once the wars were done, sent in their finest corporations to win contracts for oil and construction. War is a modern century business, not a solution. Some knew this, many were indifferent, others took no initiative but what was common was that all of them chose to walk away. This phenomenon is also called the brain drain and we certainly do not realise that the very best, who were once amongst us, are now abroad building foreign economies. As this nation crumbles, I do not blame them. They couldn’t have done much if a man like Imran Khan failed in this election. The truth is that ‘they’ will never let Khan reign, elections will continue to be farcical and this democracy shall remain defunct. Notwithstanding who sent him, Tahir-ul-Qadri quite proved to be the local version of Nostradamus. Electronic voting, anyone?

Back to the start again. It was 1948 and Jinnah was in Ziarat. Elahi Bakhsh, his doctor, noticed that while Jinnah talked, he lost breath after each sentence, and that he moistened his lips nervously. The doctor asked Jinnah to rest but was met by a stern protest, “For 40 years I have worked for 14 hours a day, never knowing what disease was.” No one knew of his tuberculosis as yet but it was clear that something was terribly wrong. Jinnah spent these 40 years building this nation. For the few that couldn’t have it, destroyed this very place on June 15, 2013, where an ashen grey Jinnah fought against his failing 70-pound body for a country that was on its knees. Have you wondered why?

I have significantly wondered about these motley failures but have no solution to offer. You might forgive me in knowledge that I am not to blame. But at this dark and disgusted hour, I would like to quote Confucius: “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

The writer is studying at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and can be reached at k.alizubair@hotmail.com