Daily Times

“When gods want to punish us,” Oscar Wilde said, “they answer our prayers.” They did when a mass of lumpenproletariat crudely assisted by not-so-invisible power manoeuvred your way to the throne with a wafer-thin majority. The countries run by a remote control do not have the luxury to be ruled by a majority but by a nod from the visibly invisible authority holding the real power.

Not that you alone have the distinction of seeking and finding the approval of the real masters, your predecessors, the fallen enemy too reached the corridor of power by mounting on the shoulders of the same power supposed to stay out of the political arena.

“Sovereign is he,” Carl Schmitt said, “who decides the state of emergency.”

By now, you must have realised the profundity of his statement. The dismay and chagrin writ, large on your face, narrate the terrible truth that a man who stands for nothing falls for everything. Your stubborn but sullen face proves Nietzsche succinct. Since people have discovered many antidotes, they do not die of fatal truths. Your much-hyped u-turn is one such antidote.

Your fictionalised state of Medina was too delusional to face the everyday reality of economics. When the market economy forced you to kneel before the gods of IMF and to an army of self-seeking anti-people technocrats, whose sole function was to serve the interests of imperialism and the parasitic praetorian guards, it crumbled. While embracing the infidels of the Monetary Fund, your state of Medina had to exile God. You can abhor socialism, but the reality is the God of prophets and the Almighties of capital cannot get along together. The market lacks idealism, and the religion was founded on it.

People, who once cried for a hero, have concern no more. They merely long for bread and circus

Why I felt the need to address you directly because I visited Pakistan for a brief period, long enough to see the plight of the masses, groaning under the inflation, price hike and a withered state ruled by groups of Sicilian Mafia. People, who once cried for a hero, have concern no more. They merely long for bread and circus; failing to provide the former as your government is compensating with the latter. Your ministers are virtually street comedians. Their presence on television is a shabby advertisement lacking drama.

I, too, have the baggage of my personal experiences. The department of electricity (implicitly, one of the most inept, corrupt and incompetent departments) had raised the tariff on my closed, empty and locked native house. The expropriation did not surprise me, but what was upsetting was the dismissal of my appeal by the office of the federal Ombudsman on frivolous grounds. The honourable judge alleged me of using the electricity for agricultural purposes. Dazed and confused, I could not figure out how a small lawn of a massively constructed house had suddenly become an agricultural property. It is scandalous but the neo-liberal justice presupposes injustice.

The veracity of the truth about the lawn can be confirmed from Dr Zafar Mirza, one of your smart health advisors, imported from abroad to fix our health problems with a minimal clue to them. The worthy advisor prepared for his final term MBBS examination in the same house. I shun the power structure. It makes people dizzy, and I have no intention to involve any person of any authority to gain favour. I am referring to him as a witness to the alleged “crime scene.”

It is the same house where four decades ago, my mentor, Prof Farrukh Ahmed Khan, performed his first surgery in my city. The irony is that nature quickly takes back beautiful people in its womb and leaves the rust to rot in the open. I know you from the day when Australia, led by Greg Chappell, visited Pakistan. During the final test at Lahore, Prof Farrukh designated me as an honorary medical officer of the Pakistani cricket team. As members of the team, my staff found you thankless. You demanded the physiotherapy with arrogance and left the pavilion on every occasion without thanks.

The pretence of shyness was your defence and you had successfully masqueraded your narcissism and indifference to the plight of the ordinary human being behind it. Despite your arrogance, people loved you because of your glorious performances. In the world of cricket, you were a legend, but you forgot that winning the accolade does not differ from attaining consciousness of one’s being and both demand the presence of other fellow human beings. The performance alone does not guarantee an individual to become an idol; the enthusiasm of the worshippers is essential in turning a mortal being into a god, detesting the worshipper while relishing your sublimity was your biggest sin.

Coming back to my plight, I found the sewerage system around my house clogged. The water containing faecal matter practically flooded my house. The stench had transcended the limits of endurance. Despite my repeated visits to WASA, no one paid heed to my requests. I returned to Sydney on a rainy evening from a house inundated with water with no space to come out without sailing through it.

This is not a picture of a single house but of the country, which is in absolute shambles. In an exceptionally cold winter, lack of basic amenities such as gas and water, and frequent daylong outages of electricity, especially every Sunday, made the life ideology of its absence. It was the winter of discontent and, as Camus said, “In the light from conflagrations, the world had suddenly shown its wrinkles and its wounds old and new. It had aged all at once, and we with it.”

This is a gloomy story of a dysfunctional state where people disappear in the bright daylight to be found dead in the murky shadows of night. Where an army-chief presides with the prime minister to not only endorse but also sanctify the “same -page- myth” but also to express the reality where the power rests. The large populace of Punjab is sedated and suppressed. It is anxious and jittery but rudderless. That is the only heartening news for your regime, which unfurled the flag of anti-corruption. Your honesty turned out to be nothing more than a rationalisation for vindictiveness. Your era has made the trend of corruption more bullish than before.

My wife and I are driving our vehicles from the last three decades, but our renewed computerised driving licenses do not mention the previous record. On enquiry, the concerned person in the SSP’s office demanded Rs 35,000 per person to provide us with actual licences having complete history; a real swindle. However, it does not involve a single soul but manifests the corrupt soul of the whole department and the entire setup. The constellation surrounding you has a bright star who has earned the official title of a swindler from the highest court.

That is the saga of a drowning ruling-class catching at a khaki-straw to survive another day, while the young Pashtuns and Baloch are rewriting history with their blood in the same vein as the radicals did in Bengal. One can hope that Punjabi youngsters will join them soon. The sight of young Arooj waving her skinny arms through her loosely fitting jacket, defying the coercive state, gives a new impetus to the faltering hopes. That was the sight when in the middle of winter, Camus and I discovered an invincible summer within us.

The writer is an Australian-Pakistani based in Sydney. He has authored several books on Marxism (Gramscian and Frankfurt schools) and history