65 Years of Pakistan Gone Waste! The List Of Challenges Is Endless
06 January 2013
By Saeed Qureshi
The religious zealots contend that Pakistan is a
citadel of Islam, although most of the religious
parties opposed the creation of Pakistan. Pseudo
nationalists gloat that it is a nuclear power. I say
Pakistan cannot be the second country after the United
States to use the atomic bomb under any circumstances
as it would receive the same in return.
Which Pakistan are we speaking and proud of? The one
with barricades and barriers all over the land as if
the whole country is a jail or a concentration camp.
Religious denominations and cults take pride and
self-entertaining divine blessing for massacring each
other. The more this nation is getting into the
religious mindset the more barbaric, backward looking
and intellectually marooned it is becoming.
In every locality or street, there are loudspeakers
blurring sermons and Azan (summoning for prayer) five
times a day causing a lethal sound pollution. People
defecate in the open or in manual latrines, all the
members taking turns. The meagerly paid sweepers from
scheduled caste carry away the heaps of human
excretion on a weekly basis and dump it in an open
filth depot or dumpster (I am not talking of
Islamabad) where it rots for days till the rain washes
it away. The municipality trucks come once in a blue
moon.
In a sanitation and sewerage deficient country, if you
find human refuse running into open drains outside the
houses, don't take it seriously. If swarms of
mosquitoes and flees surround you all the way to your
destination be it market, mosque and work place take
it as indifferently as part of a decadent civic order.
If the worms and bacteria cause deadly epidemics,
don't panic.
Don't mind the mind-boggling traffic jams on the
narrow roads as we are destined to endure those and
that by our faith we are goaded to thank God in every
affliction. The puzzling and ear-splitting sound of
smoke emitting rickshaws and run down buses are not
eye sores because that is how Pakistan is supposed to
be. If the whole landscape, roads, footpaths, market
places are littered with garbage; such gory spectacles
should not incense you as we have been living under
these abominable conditions since the inception of the
Islamic Republic of Pakistan. And Islam ordains
cleanliness is half faith (Iman)
A culture of dishonesty and deliberate delinquency
pervades and sprouts in every office, from presidency
to make shift kiosks (khokhas). In offices burdened
with red tape and inefficiency and nepotism, the five
times praying Muslims prey upon the visitors and
customers with full vengeance to pay for what they
were doing for them as public servants. It is called
bribe or graft is simple terminology.
The merits and licenses are for sale. If you need a
connection for electricity or water or gas or phone,
don't go straight to the concerned department with
only an application. Along the official fee take a
service fee exclusively for the official doing the
needful. But still your name will be place in the
waiting list. A letter from a political heavyweight or
powerful bureaucrat would also be helpful. Be aware
nothing is done on merit.
After 65 years, it takes 90 minutes to cover a
distance of 10 miles to and fro Islamabad and
Rawalpindi: the so called sister cities in the Potohar
plateau. The police pickets, the road barriers, the
para military contingents stop you to find if you are
a suicide bomber. The social life in the most
protected cities has come to such a dreadful pass. I
remember, as a student, it would take maximum 45
minutes to reach Rawalpindi from Wah cantonment by
bus. Now this time is no less than three hours and one
has to pay toll tax at many places.
Go to the Bara or Landi Kotal (tribal enclave) to buy
a 12 bore pistol for a pittance. Come back to your
city, get into a house and rob the inmates and get
rich overnight. The police would not know and would
not like probe who committed such a crime because this
has become a commonplace daily occurrence. But if you
want to indulge or watch a combined spree of robbing,
killing, raping and extortion, go to Karachi. And take
care you could also be hit.
Pakistan is the most ideal place to witness murders
and massacres for reasons ranging from ethnic,
sectarian, tribal, clannish, honor to land grabbing or
just for show off in streets. The poor raped young
girls have to produce four eyewitnesses to prove that
they were raped. Is it possible? Law and order has
become razor thin and no one cares who is killing and
who is being killed.
It is a tall order to explore who is raping whom, who
is kidnapped and who kidnaps. These are signs of
doomsday but the prophesied doomsday has already
descended on the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Ironically Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace
as it commands that killing one person is killing the
whole humanity. Just imagine how many humanities have
been killed and are being killed in Pakistan.
The new generations of Pakistan boys, girls, toddlers,
adolescents, are living in an atmosphere of persistent
fear, insecurity, bomb blasts, rape, arson, loot and
plunder, in filth, in dark and dingy streets, in a
nauseating environment of sound and filth pollution.
They come out of the homes with a lurking fear of
being blasted or kidnapped and targeted for
unspeakable heinous crimes.
The food is costly and adulterated, the drugs and
medicines are spurious, and the water is contaminated.
The meat could be of a dog, a pig or mad cow. Who
cares and scrutinizes for such infringements. How many
young children are forced to work with sex maniacs at
auto workshops and restaurants or hotels or in private
homes as servants? How alarming the level of
molestation of the underage males and females is: no
one bothers.
The country is in the grip of Thana and Patwari
culture, the symbols of corruption and vehicles of
obsolete, moribund institutions started by Mughal
emperor Akbar the great, or the British colonialist.
Caring a fig of what the law or the religion
obligates, invariably everyone from the president to a
police constable seems to be obsessed with making
money through fair and fouls alike. The whole nation
has fallen into a morass of moral sleaze.
The contracts are given in wrong and delinquents
hands. The newly laid out roads are washed away in one
shower of rain, the bridges dash to the ground not
long after being commissioned. If rental power
generation units are purchased from foreign sellers,
it brings hefty commissions to buyers (Raja rental
scandal) and crooks are elevated to higher positions.
Pitiably such leased power units do not produce a watt
and are paid in advance to the tune of billions of
rupees.
When poverty grinds and inflation ruins the household,
the crimes and prostitution sprout and rob the people
of modesty, honor and religious penchant. That is what
is happening in Pakistan and that country created in
the name of Islam may turn into another Thailand in
due course.
The army was there at the helm for half of Pakistan's
existence, a drunkard and lewd military president held
the first free elections and then equaled this good
deed by truncating Pakistan. Cessation of East
Pakistan and surrender of a Muslim army are those
calumnies that cannot be washed ever unless Ganges
turns flowing opposite and the sun rises from the
west. And during those crippling moments (surrender)
several generals, politicians and bureaucrats were
reported drinking in five star hotels with their
concubines. This is story of a nation that claims that
it ruled the sub content for a thousand years.
And that army is now braced against its own people in
roughest and most dangerous terrain of the world. They
are fighting and dying in a war that was purposeless
for Pakistan. If there was no obscurantism until 1980
notwithstanding Bhutto turning Pakistan into another
Saudi Arabia, from it came all of sudden. So Pakistan
an economically feeble and socially torn apart country
has to put up two pronged war: one with the enemy
across the eastern border, the other against Islamic
militants rampaging the length and breadth of
Pakistan.
Why in 65 years, the sermons and preaching of Muslim
pontiffs failed to turn Pakistanis into good citizens
not to speak of good Muslims? Yet the dreary and
ineffectual sermons continue to foster sectarian
hatred, reinforcing warnings of hellfire. Alongside,
the construction of new mosques remains apace
uninhibited. If there could not be one single model
Islamic dispensation in 1400 years, how one would hope
for that in the present times when old taboos and
gospels are losing their relevance.
Which war is for Islam and which one to safeguard the
territorial integrity of Pakistan? Pakistan is doomed
as the menace of Taliban abetted by external abettors
would not die nor surrender so soon. There is a noose
of Islamic militancy around the neck of Pakistan that
is tightening by way of proliferation of bomb blasts
and violence.
Can one dream for the day when a true and patriotic
leadership would take the reins of Pakistan? Will that
day dawn when the citizens would travel with a relief
that their lives would be safe and they won't be
molested, kidnapped or killed on the way? Can we
visualize a society when law and order would prevail
and dispensation of unhampered justice would be
possible by nabbing the highest culprits in
government, aristocracy and from the elite classes?
Would our judges be upright and strong to uphold the
law and not selling the justice? Can our institutions,
government departments and bureaucracy function even
by a fraction of other civil societies?
Can Pakistan generate enough electricity that the word
"load shedding" becomes obsolete? Can everyone have
access to schooling, medical facilities' drinking
water and job? Can we integrate the Islamic teachings
into the established curricula and syllabi and close
the ghost schools imparting hatred and spurious Islam
to the students who come to Islamic nurseries due to
poverty or ignorance?
Can we limit the number of religious institutions and
affiliate them with the national educational system
from the primary to the university level? Can we bring
about a national reconciliation? Can we eliminate the
thugs, the crooks, the public enemies, briber takers,
the goons, and all those who have turned Pakistan into
one of the most dangerous and debased places to live?
Can our roads be widened, railways modernized, bridges
built, hidden natural resources tapped and stalled
projects such Kalabagh be undertaken? Can the whole
country be washed of the glut of dirt and debris and
trash? Can the cities be embraced with centralized
sewerage system? Can we check the burgeoning
population so that the resources can be better
utilized?
Can we elect a leadership that is visionary, selfless,
imbued with nationalistic spirit, progressive and
dedicated to promote a democratic culture and
liberalizing the society? Can a stable, democratic,
economically prosperous and socially liberal, and
civically a modern Pakistan be rebuilt? The list of
challenges is endless. It primarily depends upon the
quality of the leadership that we choose.
©
EsinIslam.Com
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