Daily Times

My critics on Twitter and some through e-mails tend to mount an illogical defence of our ‘failed ideology’ by using the ‘Objectives Resolution’ as the real ‘Two Nation Theory’. I laugh and overlook their intellectual delinquency, as you cannot form an ideology after you have achieved your goal, so to speak. One of these days, I will unpack that historical blunder as well, but for right now and for the sake of brevity will stick to the topic at hand.

One may argue that a mission statement can be redefined based on the circumstances. Agreed, but there is a difference between a mission statement and the real basis for any revolutionary idea. A revolutionary idea that affects the lives of millions has to have a sound basis. Lack thereof invites rather the failure, fissures and disasters we are witnessing for so long. The aftermath of the East Pakistan debacle has exposed our absurdities. I have written here in the past about that ugly episode. Again, I will refrain from revisiting that chapter over and over again.

One has to be utterly dumbfounded by the logic that I will present to you. A significant number of our fellow brethren migrated from India after the partition. Decades have elapsed, but we still call them mohajir (migrant). Why are the people who migrated from India and settled all over Pakistan, and have distinct regional identities such as Sindhis, Punjabis and Pashtuns not considered migrants? Why are the migrants who do not have a distinct regional identity associated with a regional language still considered migrants? Mind you, they follow the same religion and values like us yet one can see a stark difference.

With the abject and undeniable failure of our foundation, we have foolishly tried to invent an identity by aligning ourselves with the Arabs, trying desperately to redeem ourselves at all costs. In a futile attempt to run away from our true heritage of Indian descent, we have called ourselves pseudo-Arabs and have failed miserably. Try planting a rose garden from the seeds of a cactus. It is just not going to happen. In this confusion, we have created a major hotchpotch.

There is a volatile and confused nation that is unable to reconcile with this bitter fact. A nation raised on fabrication, half-truths, failed ideologies and overly religious attitudes is bound to fail. There is no question about it. I will clarify my position again; religion in itself is the best thing to have. We all need an anchor for our souls, but to try to transform a society and an entire nation with my ‘personal anchor’ is going to rebound. Then making sure that all and sundry toe the line of my personal anchor, at any cost, is a no-brainer for utter idiocy.

The fact that our masses are still debating whether Jinnah was a Shia or not, 64 years after his death, can clearly demonstrate the height of our collective ideological infancy. As if a Shia is not capable of connecting with the masses to create a movement that alters the course of history. A land full of supposedly educated and enlightened people so judgmental about each other’s beliefs and faiths has to go in a downward spiral. In all these years, the state has tried to create a mindset of playing the ‘Big Brother’ focusing on people’s faith.

What I am going to raise as a few questions now may offend many a folk, but what the heck. Are we a truly ‘independent’ country? If we are dependent on ‘foreign aid’ and ‘foreign ideas’, then it behooves us to inflate our chests on every August 14 and pretend that we are so independent. If the presumed persecution of Muslims in a predominantly ‘Hindu country’ was the reason, then why are so many fellow Muslims in our land persecuted and hounded? In the last 65 years or so, what is our greatest achievement that we can flaunt in front of the world? I have a few, more painful questions but for the sake of sensitivities, I will pause here.

Some readers have e-mailed me and questioned my motivation behind this miniseries. They have criticised my so-called ‘anti-Pakistan’ stance. I respectfully disagree with them and re-emphasise that my hyphenated identity has ‘Pakistani’ as a prefix. My objective is to raise some pertinent questions and allow us to think objectively. There is no doubt in my mind that our ideology needs to be redefined. It is for our own good and the sake of our survival. Believe it or not, I do have some solutions to offer as well, the solutions that offer us an overhaul of our entire mindset. In hopefully the final installment of next week, I will lay out those solutions for the benefit of my readers.

(To be continued)

The writer is a Pakistani-American mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar