File photo. Saeed Khan—AFP
With this year’s devastating floods across Pakistan, some people are recalling the “promise of greatness” that the country carried when it was formed in 1947. Today, it is down on its knees, but most Pakistanis think back and presume that the state was born with these “promises of greatness” that it has been deprived of.
First of all, it is unfair to think of greatness when Pakistan is heavily flooded with rainwater in all its four provinces and is in need of help that the world is luckily appearing ready to provide. Thinking of “greatness” at a time when the state is in danger is not fair. Ideal is good to begin with but when the state is undergoing calamity it is unwise to remind it of the ideals that were rightly or wrongly associated with it. Today, Pakistan can’t afford to fall back on dreams: its saving rate is 11 percent as opposed to 25.3 percent for Bangladesh and 29.3 percent for India.
After 75 years, Pakistan has fought many wars and is today fighting with itself, its politicians considered mostly corrupt and its democratic institutions undermined by ideology. The state was conceived by a community that, once rulers of India, had fallen behind under the British Raj. When a westernized Jinnah thought of a state for Muslims, he didn’t know the extent to which the Muslims had fallen behind. He thought of a secular-democratic modern state but was soon disabused of the notion after 1947. Muslim imagination thought of religion when thinking of the new state, ignoring the non-Muslims that would have to live in it. The word “ideology” caught on when the other state created in the basis of modern, non-religious ideology—the Soviet Union—already was falling down on human rights. Pakistan drove relentlessly towards its ideological goal till things went wrong with it. Its ideology became tougher and tougher: in the early years, Pakistan’s national anthem contained the word “Khuda”; today it might think of replacing it with “Allah.”
High on ideology, Pakistan fell back in education and the journey into the negative is continuing with no lessons learned; and if Imran Khan comes into power and introduces the “uniform” syllabus he treasures the country will specialize in producing morons. To begin with, religious parties who didn’t win elections retired into the seats of learning. Non-clerical parties fought and won elections by paying lip-service to Islam. They ignored the fact that religious parties were steadily winning college and university union elections and thus dominating the campuses. The “modern” rulers went to the United Nations and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights thinking all rights mentioned in the charter must be Islamic because how could Islam be opposed to human rights? It took half a century, and rule by an Islamist general in Pakistan, Ziaul Haq, to realize that Pakistan had signed a U.N. Charter allowing the right to change religion, which Islam punishes with death. Today, because of ideology, Pakistan is overpopulated, backward in education and economy, and looking to the IMF to save it from collapse for the 23rd time. “Greatness” is a reach too far; “survival” might be the best we can hope for.