Daily Times

Once upon a time, in a far off land, there was a nation that cobbled together a state, ideated to base on the cornerstones of democracy, social justice, equality and liberty. They paid the price for the great rebellion with many lives but their glamorous aspirations turned into sorry apprehensions. Sadly, the dreams envisaged by them did not hatch into the associated materialisations. Democracy stumbled upon dacoits in the cloaks of some fixated personalities, families and bloodlines. Social justice was compromised to coveted self interests and liberty succumbed to the loads of rule by the majority. Benjamin Franklin’s hypothesis matured into a well-founded theory in our case: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”

We did not witness democracy in practice though our romance with it has been innate. We began with a smoldering democracy and its dawdling cold replacement by power politics. Influential people concocted like-minded and like-interests groups of people and branded these groups as political parties. To run the affairs of these political parties, the subsistence expenditures were funded by other men within these groups and those outside ushering in the systemic-culture of black politico-econometrics. The stage of political dialectics was next set up where these interest and pressure groups turned political parties were brought into structured state power. Once in control of power, they paid back the investments incurred on these political groups both in cash and kind out of the public taxes called the public exchequer. They managed and utilised the state apparatus for promoting their agendas where the state machinery was turned into a maid to serve influential political groups protecting their vested interests. It was here where the social justice and principles of socio-economic equity and liberty were miserably mutilated in this system of vested interests, which served the ends of few people at the expense of all citizens of the state. Hopes of good governance and socio-economic prosperity became Dickens’s Great Expectations, meant never to be fulfilled.

The history of democracy is only a tale of dogmatic personalities, families, houses and blood lines

The rule of majority was, thus, branded out as democracy. In this take one, reality was established that one who ruled Punjab ruled the country since it provided the largest demographic group, which was instrumental in forming the majority through the vote counts. With that provision, the rule of majority was perpetuated and the power center slowly began to evolve around the maximum head counts. The situation being such, the small federating units were at marginal discard of the significance spectrum in this federation of inequalities and the substance of vested interests groups and families grew in form larger than life. State tools such as media, civil society, philanthropy, state’s development policies and etc., focused on the province, which was center of all these power politics. The small federating units, especially Balochistan, which had a merely negligible share in this equation of power politics, bore the heaviest burnt. Being so lowly a sound amid the loudest of majority shrieks, the small units were never heard. Biologically, they seized the sense of speech and a marginal but crucial radio silence prevailed in the country. The trickledown effect of monopolised politics took over the smaller federating units within, which, too, subscribed to power politics dominated by families, bloodlines and individual personality cults.

Another surprising feature of these groups is that outwardly, their sermons for the sake of fair democracy are un-ending but the cultural controls within these political parties are paradoxically and predominantly totalitarian. The head of the party on whose name the party is coined practically owns the party like a business magnate. He is the fountain of justice and the infallible king occupying the political corporation. This proves the majority rule in the shape of democracy and bitterly deceives the fundamental principle of liberty wholly unbalancing the democracy-liberty political equation.

The history of democracy is only a tale of dogmatic personalities, families, houses and blood lines who in the names of political parties arranged for certain groups of influential people who populated the state power vicinity. The emergence of a distinct power coveted class struck a deal of political collusion with each others agreeing on joint and mutual protection of each other against all odds which threatened undoing the status quo at any juncture. The common people are continuously beguiled by these groups in the mazes of democracy by which they are shrouding their inconspicuous lust for power and memorializing their own interests using the grand propaganda tactic of Big Lie. The artificial system erected in the name of democracy is in fact a vicious circle where the interest groups are managing the state power and exchanging turns of its monopolization. There are a lot of fakes and takes behind the veil of Democracy indoctrinated by these houses of Democracy. Rest is only the tale of how one pressure group is replaced by the other.

The writer is a civil servant based in Quetta