Pakistan is a country comprising of a few short of 190 million simpletons. Every five years, the politicians suddenly remember us, if in case the esteemed defenders of the nation are gracious enough not to intrude and overturn the apple cart their way and throw remnants to the blue-eyed some. Come election time and they need our vote. They promise us everything, including plucking the stars from the sky just for u, the precious Pakistani voters, and we the so dearly, want to believe in everything these people say, anything to sweep us off our feet and place our votes in their deep pockets. They use ‘focus groups’ to target us with the precise message we want to hear. They make us feel important, make us think that the fate of the nation is in our hands. The truth, of course, is that it will make no difference who wins the election. The same families will still be in charge. They are never up for elections. These families comprising of politicians, religious clergy, civil and military bureaucracy, comprising not more than 300 families, have as much wealth as the 190 million Pakistanis. They rake in the moolah while the country wallows in wars, sectarian and ethnic strife, organised crime, disease, poverty, starvation, floods, drought, hyperinflation, terrorism, external threats, and the list goes on.
The first 24 years of Pakistan’s creation, its military, bureaucratic and political elite carried out detrimental policies, alienating both ethnic and religious minorities and the ethnic majority, sparkling the 1971 uprising in East Pakistan, defeat at the hands of India and secession of half of the country. For the next 30 years the same elite, then dominated by the military and often in alliance with the US, nurtured Islamic extremists, which helped prepare the ground for 9/11 and making Pakistan a pariah state. Democracy was more a game of musical chairs and had more or less the same self-serving families passing the torch of corruption, inefficiency and incompetence, thwarted whenever convenient by the puppeteers, a practice that continues unabated to date.
One might wonder how is such a thing possible? The 190 million people could shove these 300 families out in a trice. So why don’t they? Why do 190 million people permit themselves to be starved of the resources needed to provide a productive life while 300 selfish families are allowed to live like gods? Their wealth amassing by the day, their progeny already marked as the heirs to the ‘throne’, their money sitting pretty in foreign banks, properties and corporations. Why?
The answer is simple. The 300, to keep their position, have had to wage an astonishingly effective propaganda war to justify their wealth, power, status and position. The reason that we, the 190 million, do nothing is that we have been manipulated into thinking that it is right and proper that the 300 are so powerful. We, the simpletons have had a false consciousness constructed for ourselves by them in the garb of patriotism and religion. We are made to believe that our interests are directly connected to this elite when in fact the opposite is true.
Most of the nightmares presented by the rulers to terrify us, the masses, are the opposite of the truth. They themselves are the nightmare. If all of the assets of this elite amassed domestically and abroad are seized, the debts of this country could be paid off and we would be up and running rather than imploring the donor nations to fill our begging bowls on preposterous interest terms. So why do we not do exactly that? Was it not the elite that brought us to the brink of disaster? It was certainly not any of us — the ordinary people — who had no decision-making input at all. Therefore, should not this set of the elite be held accountable for the disaster they created themselves? Should they not pay? Why are we, the masses paying in the shape of overpriced petrol (government fleeces Rs 24.50/litre), electricity, gas, etc? The domestic debt/liabilities are surging by a whopping Rs 1,500 billion approximately per annum and the overall burden would reach approximately Rs 8,000 billion by the end of financial year 2011-12. Only during the current year Rs 1,648 billion have been borrowed to meet budgetary expenses by the rulers. How that debt would be paid back is anybody’s guess.
They have got it made. Even in the midst of the current catastrophic situation, endless load shedding, hyper-inflation, burgeoning poverty, organised sectarian and ethnic mayhem, they are still paying themselves enormous salaries, perks, TADA and protocol bills, while all the debts they run up are dumped on us, the dumb taxpayers. When you can rob someone blind and they even help you put your hands in their pockets to remove every last rupee, you know you are indestructible, that your propaganda is so deeply ingrained that we, the people, can no longer think straight. We do not know how to pursue our own self-interest cause. If we did, we would not have let these people control our country, lives, and the future of our generations.
(To be continued)
The writer is a businessman and a social activist based in Lahore. He can be reached at [email protected]