Daily Times

Returning home after a week of travel, I find that the line separating fact from fabrication is ever more blurred with efforts constantly afoot to manipulate one look like the other while, in reality, the two are the diametric extremes of a pendulum movement.

The disastrous effects of this syndrome are transmitting rapidly to our representatives abroad. For example, the one in Beijing made a claim at a recent bilateral engagement that load-shedding in Pakistan was a story of the past. In doing so, he would have believed that the ones within range would either be brainless, or deprived of the faculty of hearing. Neither of the presumptions is generally true. Consequently, such-like stalwarts portraying non-existent national virtues have either to cut a sorry figure much to the embarrassment of the country, or they end up doing more damage than good to the national cause.

They create a world of illusion and fantasy to turn themselves into a saleable commodity — and they want others to believe the crap they narrate without a break. Worse still, they get paid for doing so!

In Pakistan, the effort of transforming fabrication into fact is assuming the proportions of an art form with an ever larger number of people falling gullibly onto its venomous tracks. The heinous Christmas-eve attack on the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church in Quetta killing nine people and injuring dozens more, some of them seriously, is a case in point. Instead of facing up to the fact that this is one more of a series of gruesome features dotting our daily lives which need to be combated with a strong and pragmatic narrative coupled with display of political will, layers of fabrication will be built to dull its impact, even creating erroneous and misleading impressions regarding its hows and whys.

The sequential steps of such an effort would include stories on the relative infrequency of terror attacks in Pakistan, even less so in the sectarian and religious domains, the positive outcome of the military operations which have been conducted in the recent past, the timely intervention of the security personnel in averting damage which could have been far more lethal, and trying to drown the sickness of terror in a parlance of condolence and sympathy messages overflowing with intent to help the families which have suffered. There will also be a deafening crescendo of an unflinching national resolve to ensure that the criminals and their aiders and handlers are punished. All this will be conveniently forgotten once overtaken by another similar or dissimilar event in the not so distant future.

A state losing out on its integrity and credibility becomes a rudderless object adrift the waves which drive it further away from shores. We are pretty far out in the middle of a storm already and any further bolts will render us clueless how to come to terms with a false reality that we have been labouring to create over decades

I would not be surprised if someone were to craft an outlandish fable that the church was not the real target, but someone who was in the vicinity at that given moment, this being a case of personal enmity. In turn, such-like narrative would be parroted wildly in the evening television shows in an attempt to create further hallucinations. No one will dare ask why such-like things keep happening, and why is this malaise growing with time?

Let’s move to another avenue which illustrates this effort of merging fact with fabrication, even at the cost of clouding the integrity of a key state pillar. Ever since the abject failure of virtually all institutions to deal with accountability- and transparency-related cases falling in their domains, and with all of this landing at the doorsteps of the judiciary, it has been targeted for its alleged partisanship. Its judgments against the former prime minister have been portrayed as apt evocations of its deep-set prejudice. It has also been condemned afor having acted in conformity with a script written elsewhere. The painstaking soliloquies establishing the indispensability of individuals over the state and its institutions is an aberration of the grossest form, yet promoted forcefully in this wonder-land.

In the process, the other side of the coin is completely overlooked, the one dealing with the history of crime and corruption of the family over decades. The unabashed disdain with which such misleading projections are made in public and then stoutly defended during the hilarious comedy shows enacted in the evening television transmissions is unbelievable. But not for the ones who are propounding the falsehoods and who would want every viewer to believe them to the postscript. No shame. No embarrassment. At the end of it all, one is lost in separating fact from fiction. It is all so enmeshed.

At a different level, facts stand out from fabrications in no uncertain terms as, indeed, these should. No matter how thick we try to lay it out for the world, it can see through the load of crap which melts at the first incision of enquiry. But, in the process, alongside creating doubts about our efficacy as a nation, we also lose our credibility — as would a claim that load-shedding in Pakistan is a story of the past. Looking at the person later, I did not see a shred of remorse. It is like they are tutored in the art of lying shamelessly — and they do!

This will not do, now or in the longer run. This is creating more complications than remedies. A state losing out on its integrity and credibility becomes a rudderless object adrift the waves which drive it further away from shores. We are pretty far out in the middle of a storm already and any further bolts will render us clueless how to come to terms with a false reality that we have been labouring to create over decades. Facts, once merged with fabrications, create a mess which may lie beyond any form of empirical description or recognition. Worse still, this concoction generates its own drivers.

We may have gone a fair distance into our venture, but there may still be time for us to look back at the huge heap of litter that has piled up behind. No one is going to clear it for us. We’ll have to do it ourselves — if only we were inclined. This effort entails the mammoth task of sifting fact from fabrication and chiselling a way forward that would be within the domain of the doable. Nothing less will do.

The writer is a political and security strategist, and heads the Regional Peace Institute — an Islamabad-based think tank. Email: raoofhasan@hotmail.com. Twitter: @RaoofHasan

Published in Daily Times, December 19^th 2017.