Daily Times

As Anand Girdharadas writes in the International New York Times, “If anything unites America in this fractious moment, it is a widespread sentiment that power is somewhere other than where you are.” Anxiety of impotence has disenchanted the American public, and has robbed half of the US electorate, The Republican party’s vote bank, of making a sane choice for the upcoming presidential elections in the US. Their powerlessness has persuaded them to thrust their say in American political mainstream for redemption in the form of Donald Trump who, through demagogy of going hard against all others in the US, including Muslims, women and Mexicans, is beguiling American masses of how to realise American dream of progress come true. Typical anxiety of impotence is being at play in Pakistani political landscape.

For readers’ convenience, anxiety of impotence can be defined as corrosive uneasiness with respect to location of power. Where in the US, dynamics of such anxiety has got its own set, but in Pakistan’ case, anxiety of powerlessness in common citizen is being fed by lack of rule of law, extremism, culture of passing bucks to others and lack of national level of leadership. Out of sheer suffering from anxiety, powerless citizens have been petted against each other for quenching their thirst of power. This pervasive lack of power among citizens has blessed, unfortunately, the whole nation with one overarching attribute that is, “we are all judgmental”.

Ask someone from other three provinces except Punjab about state of affairs going on in the country and you will find one parallel in all citizens’ opinions: growing disgruntling against Punjab’s monopoly over the state’s resources. Ask someone in Punjab and you will find a baffled face that himself/herself is not sure where power is located and what is going on his/her behalf in power corridors. Same confusion lies in power sphere. Government for its failures makes establishment a punching bag while establishment throws ball in the court of the government, if ever being made accountable with respect to poor state of governance.

This fluid concept of power has made a common man suffer from anxiety of powerlessness. Out of sheer suffering from powerlessness, something in common with American electorate, major chunk of electorate, youth, in Pakistan recently saw a glimmer of hope in the rhetoric of PTI sit-ins, and rode on that bandwagon, but, like Trump-shepherded Republican party which has no policy of its own for America’s problems except every-thing-is-wrong slogan, Imran-led PTI has no concrete policy of its own except the rhetoric that all politicians in other parties except PTI are corrupt, and solution to Pakistan’s problems lie in purging all the corrupt politicians and giving PTI a chance to govern the country.

History is evident to the fact that people, when are pushed to the wall in the political chessboard, reply to replenish their sense of powerlessness through two ways. In the first case, powerless people turn their powerlessness to unity and in collectivity try to create a space for themselves in power structure. Such examples can be epitomized by movements such as Black Lives Matter and Feminism etc. In the second case, sense of being not grounded robs people of their sanity and they try to redeem their state through violent means. In the latter’s case, if the antagonist is state, their sense of citizenship gets eroded and instead of striving for their rights through constitutional means they resort to violence for gaining their rights.

Anxiety of impotence across Pakistan has been on display among citizens which can be vindicated by a simple formula: sit with a citizen, whether educated or uneducated, and ask his/her opinion about the current state of governance in Pakistan. Lest this wave of anxiety gets entrenched, there is a need on the part of the state that a sense of responsibility be invoked among collective institutions like parliament towards people’s problems so they can own them. Solution to anxiety of impotence lies in improving people’s faith in collective institutions like parliament, which can only come if parliament panders to whom it owes.

The blogger is a graduate in Social Sciences from Government College University, Lahore. He can be reached at uinam39@gmail.com