Daily Times

In his book, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) tells about a Roman emperor who, angered by the actions of his favourite jester, orders that he be put to death. The jester, hearing this, mournfully shakes his head and says that a wish of his would remain unfulfilled. Inquisitive, the emperor inquires and after some persuasion the jester tells that he has the knowledge and the ability to teach the emperor’s favourite black stallion to speak.

The emperor asks how long would it take and is told a year is enough. The death sentence is temporarily waived and the condemned jester allowed to fulfil his promise. The jester’s well-wishers tell him that he has committed a great folly as there was no way that he could make the stallion speak. He replies, “There is a possibility that in the intervening time I may die a natural death or maybe even the emperor could die and I would be free. Moreover, a year is long enough a period; who knows, the black stallion may learn to speak.”

Sixty-three years are a long enough period to change destinies but it seems the jesters here who took up the task were incompetent, corrupt and dishonest to the core, whose concept of a tryst with destiny remained limited to accumulating power and pelf for their dynasties. They neither had compassion for the people nor the wisdom to understand that they were establishing the groundwork for the eventual catastrophe. They felt if they could muster the support of their various masters and mentors for undisputed authority and power to rule, then for all intents and purposes the masses and their problems were irrelevant. They simply ensured by deceit and fraud that loans would continue to pour in to make their lives luxurious even if that meant burdening the people with irredeemable debts. These jesters have brought this place to this pass and the only route open is the way down.

It is for rulers and leaders of this ilk that Mir Taqi Mir in his couplet presciently lamented:

“Kis tarah, aah! Khaaq-e-muzzlat say main uthhoon

Uftadaa tar mujh say jo mera dastgeer ho.”

(From this abject ruin and wreck of life, alas, how can I rise?

The saviour languishes in pits below, how can he help me rise?)

Interestingly, the reasons that Gibbon expounds for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire are uncannily familiar to people here because they have seen them practised firsthand. According to him, the Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions largely due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens, which means morality and integrity ceased to be considered something worthy; these became excess baggage. They had become weak because they outsourced their duties to defend their empire to barbarian mercenaries, who then became so numerous and entrenched that they took over the empire. This army was supposed to defend the empire but instead committed excesses against the people, thereby hastening its demise.

He believed that the Romans abandoned their past hardiness, unwilling to live a tougher, ‘manly’ military lifestyle, which had been the reason for the establishment of their empire, and became effeminate. He also termed the degeneracy of the Roman army and the Praetorian Guard as a major factor of decline. In Gibbon’s view, religion too played a crucial role in the downfall as Christianity, like other religions, created a belief that a better life existed after death, which fostered an indifference to the present among Roman citizens, thus sapping their desire to sacrifice for the empire.

In the Praetorian Guard, created by Augustus at the establishment of the empire and instituted as a special class of soldiers permanently encamped in a commanding position within Rome, Gibbon saw the primary catalyst of the empire’s initial decay and eventual collapse. The Praetorian bands’ licentious fury was the first symptom and cause of the decline of the Roman Empire. Whenever armies become unanswerable to the state and become a ‘deep state’, the irreversible rot sets in and results in the disintegration of the state they are supposedly safeguarding and protecting. He also cites repeated examples of this special force abusing its power with calamitous results, including numerous instances of imperial assassination and demands of ever-increasing pay. The storyline and screenplay sounds very similar.

There is always a lot of debate about why people gradually, as if out of habit and then of necessity, come to accept the iniquities, illegalities, the injustices and denial of their original moral and rightful authority over the affairs of state. Why do they become so submissive, feeble and meek that after some time all the warped and distorted things come to be accepted as normal and natural? Why do people not only accept the jesters but also comply with their wishes?

This example will probably illustrate the reason for the submissiveness or stupor that overtakes people. Some friends, during the 1973-77 insurgency in the harsh winter of Balochistan-Afghanistan border area, took a tin of burning coal in the cave they slept in. They did not realise that the half-burnt coal produces the lethal odourless and non-irritating carbon monoxide, which if inhaled in sufficient quantity is a killer.

One of the friends who were nearly killed in that incident narrated his experience. He said that as the quantity of carbon monoxide increased, he started feeling being overcome by a very pleasant drowsiness, not realising that he was going into the slumber of death. He and others were lucky that a friend on guard duty outside returned to wake one of them for duty change. Warned by the guttural snoring of the sleepers, he realised that something was awry and pulled them all out into the open, which saved their lives.

The non-resistance to apparently minor violation of rights and injustices initially then tends to act like the non-irritating carbon monoxide slowly acting to disable the senses and abilities that discern these aberrations and oppose them. Here too the people have now become habituated to injustices and illegalities and consider all these as perfectly normal. It is because of this that those like the Baloch and civil society who have not given up on their rights are resented and considered as an aberration, though the facts are otherwise.

The writer has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com