Daily Times

“With discipline, belief and the right knowledge, we become the best we can be.” (Georges St Pierre)

It was the cloyingly hot summer of 1975 in the Spartan tenements of a British established military college for boys that a cohort of 50 young greenhorns listened to the cadenced oratory of our House Master, the legendary Saeed Rashid who intoned rhetorically in his baritone, “What is a picture? Discipline of lines and colours. What is a movie? Discipline of sounds and motions. What is an argument? Discipline of thoughts and ideas. Discipline indeed is the hardcore of success.” He made us memorise these lines and intone these on almost every English declamation contest as the carpe diem. Years later, having seen much in life the eternal verity of those line echoes musically in my ears emphasising the truth of the ideas dressed in those words.

Every great deed in the world and every great masterpiece is the result of great discipline of thought and action. Everyone has to choose either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret in life. The nations that have carved out a name for themselves by dint of hard work and sacrifice have done so with discipline and assiduity; there simply being no other way to greatness. Discipline for the Muslims was laid down through practice and precept by the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) himself when on the eve of the Battle of Uhad he forbade the archers to leave their vantage point, lest they should be surprised by the enemy. The discipline slackened as the smell of victory wafted in. The post was abandoned and the attack led by the redoubtable Khalid bin Waleed who had not embraced the faith till then turned the victory into a painful reverse. If ever there was an example, emphasising the need for discipline for the Muslims that was it.

It was the self-sacrificing discipline of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, in 480 BC that beat the vastly superior strength of 100,000 Persians and proved the veracity of George Washington’s saying about discipline being the soul of an army. Discipline, in fact, is not only the soul of an army, but of all successful endeavours in life. It is the character that takes one out of bed, a commitment that moves one to action and the discipline that makes one follow through. It was the famous bulldog spirit of the British discipline during the cataclysmic days of Nazi air raids on the British main land that sustained the British war effort, resulting ultimately in a change of fortunes. We know the nations like Germany and Japan that were decimated by the war to end all the wars i.e. WWII and that rose like a phoenix from the ashes of defeat to lead the world on the fronts of economy and industry.

This country needs discipline for survival of democracy

Where do we in Naya Pakistan find ourselves without discipline and without disciplined institutions? Nations in this age of the digital divide either lead or are led. Undisciplined hordes do not go very far in this post-industrial age of the knowledge economy. We can keep shouting from the rooftops of our “demographic dividend” till the kingdom comes yet the world could not care less. Poorly educated and inadequately trained manpower is more of a liability than being an asset in this competitive age. When we talk of discipline here, we do not talk about the parade ground or its school version. Discipline is an attribute that is ingrained in both individuals as well as the collective psyche of a nation. Consider, for instance, the Japanese self-discipline, once symbolized by the Bushido code of the warriors now metamorphosed into the “group harmony work ethics”, supported by humanistic philosophers and psychologists such as Fromm, Rogers and Maslow. Contrast this with the utilitarian discipline of the Protestant work ethic of Western countries where religion sanctifies the work as worship.

What we have here in our neck of the woods is the same old chaos and disorder that characterised the Indian subcontinent’s centuries-old history. The Indian subcontinent was a land of invaders and settlers where the invaders established their bastions of power and opulence leaving the settlers or the exploited majority at the mercy of an extractive minority that governed them to extract revenues. The practice continues from the times of Chandragupta Mauriya to the British times. The masses were always exploited and left to eke out a bare subsistence in their urban and rural sprawls without a sense of discipline. The only segments that were introduced to the taste of discipline were the loyal servants pressed into the colonial service like government servants or the military personnel. As a result, the two communities gained a character of their own with the poor masses living an undisciplined life in their urban and rural sprawls and the soldiers and bureaucrats living a regulated life in planned colonies and cantonments, away from Hoi polloi.

Hamza Alvi, the best social scientist produced, alluded to the dichotomy in his thesis about an overdeveloped state of Pakistan inheriting an underdeveloped nation. The British bequeathed infrastructure, laws, and disciplined procedures served the new nation for a few decades before the old chaos and disorder characterizing centuries old dialectical struggle between the invaders and the exploited settlers gained a hold of our country. Till the fifties and sixties, our municipal and government machinery worked with the British era efficiency because of the British trained and disciplined human resource. Slowly and inexorably our penchant for shortcuts, lethargy, and disorder undid all the remnants of British era discipline plunging us into primordial chaos visible on our roads, offices, courts, legislatures, and all spheres of community living. A simple test of our national character is the (lack of) traffic discipline. The chaotic driving without regard for lane discipline and traffic rules is reminiscent of the chariot races of barbarian hordes.

If we have to survive as a nation in this competitive world, we must get disciplined, not in a narrow sense but at a deeper philosophical level. Corruption, the bane of our national existence, has its roots in a lack of financial discipline. The economic woes are also a consequence of the lack of fiscal and planning discipline. Corruption in government, lower courts, and politics is also a consequence of poor moral discipline. What is the reason that despite being one of the most religious people in the world we score high on the corruption index? The reason is the lack of self-discipline that manifests in every aspect of our daily lives. The vehicles for disciplined existence, the world over, in this age are the national institutions. Since there is no discipline there are no strong institutions without which as per Fareed Zakaria a democracy degenerates into illiberal democracy, which is a system worse than autocracy.

This country needs discipline for democracy to survive. Without an enforcement mechanism, a population that for generations has seen short cuts, corruption, and cronyism as a way of life would go from bad to worse. To set things right, the effort should start from our schools with the government leading the charge on rehabilitating the standards and prestige of our public schools, where character building should be the main focus. The enforcement of discipline in our daily lives would only come through strong institutions and institutionalized decision-making. We might suspend some of our democratic liberties in the interest of enforcing discipline in all spheres of our public lives and when an entire generation has been acculturated in the art of disciplined living we could reintroduce those liberties.

In Mr Saeed Rashid’s immortal words, the nation has a choice, either to make a beautiful picture through the discipline of lines and colours or to blot out the beauty of our existence by ugly blotches of random colours.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST