A Reply to Caroline

The first thing to do in Pakistan is to bring back the idea of a law and order situation and to enforce an environment of legal accountibility for everyone. The law has to be made supreme and in this sense, I have no hopes in that crossed-eyed idiot who is the chief justice of Pakistan. He is nothing but a lackey of the Sharif brothers. The law in Pakistan has been ripped into shreds due to personal, power based, self-interested exceptions to the extent that it only exists in theory and not in reality.

The first task of such a leader will be impose the rule of law and s/he must be willing to punish all those who disobey the law. No exceptions and to judge such a committment, we need a leader who would willing to hang is own mother and his own family in the public square if they broke the law. Such a leader needs to create a fear of the law that makes it unthinkable for the people to break it or even think about toying with it.
Is there a person like this in Pakistan?

Next step is to get rid of the parliament in Pakistan and the present bunch of expletive deleted morons, who claim to be politcans and who could not even masterbate if they were provided detailed instructions on how to do it. By getting rid of parliament, I do not mean the idea of a legislative assembly but the people in it. The French have a saying, which in English means “for the encouragement of others” and it would be good idea to hang some of these parasites and let their bodies hang and rot in the open so the people get the idea of what it means to disappoint the public trust.

Please observe, I call the Pakistani politicans, with rare exceptions, as parasites and not leeches, because even leeches have a purpose in life. What is the expletive deleted purpose of these expletive deleted morons?

Once a good portion of these parasites are hung and their corpses thrown to the pigs, lets get rid of the present toilet paper known as the constitution of Pakistan. In the new consititution, religion has to pared down to the bare minimum and it should be confined to a person’s own thought process and must be ruthlessly chased out of the public sphere. Just as the Nazis forced the Jews to wear a Yellow Star of David, those who wish to practice religion in Pakistan have to be identified and regulated till that point in time, when the population is mature enough to accept the seperation of state and religion.

Another thing, which a would be leader of Pakistan needs to do is have a bonfire of knowledge and burn all the books that preach about a mytical Pakistan. A new education criteria has to be created, implemented and taught that places an emphasis on the critical thinking skills intead of mere rote learning and this includes the Quran. A person memorizing the Quran is no different than a parrot, because the real question is whether memorization leads to understanding and in the case of religion, understanding is imperative towards questioning the basic fundlementals of religion and even offering critiques of the Prophet Muhummad.

Will the world end, if Muhummad’s life is put under a microscope warts and all? Such an education system, with the political power of a leader committed to change the very nature of a civic-political discourse in Pakistan, needs to demystify Muhummad’s status as a demi-god and make people realize that he was only a human being, with all the flaws and handicaps of a human being.

In Pakistan, unfortunately, Muhummad is revered as an idol and not seen as man. In Pakistan, you can joke and make fun of Allah, but not of Muhummad. Why? Pakistan, and the people who preach religion there, have created a narrative of idolatory around Muhummad and that is why, Pakistan is not a country created in the name of a religion as much as it has a religion created in the name of a country.

This is why I said that Pakistan does not require retired army generals to rule it and guide it to the nearest port of salvation, but a philosopher-king. We need a leader who combines an understanding of the all contradictions, which exist in our society and has a will to lead without compromising. Pakistan does not need a vision; vision is for utopians who are clueless as to what they want, because if the idea is to save Pakistan, then it must be done at the cost of overcoming all resistence.

Consider the situation as one based on the Code of Hammurabi govered by Draco. In such a case, democracy is disaster and we should admit to ourselves that though democracy might be the best of the worst alternatives, we are not mature enough to ply a democratic goverance because we as a society cannot develop a consensus.

In the rest of the world, the ideas of nationalism unites and in Pakistan, what values we hold as common divides us and in many aspects, the would be leader has to forge a sense of country first in Pakistan let alone rule it. Such a leader has to literally create the concept of a social justice that ensures equality of certain rights in the economic sense and such a leader must erdicate the scourage of feudalim and if the feudals resist, such a leader should not shy away from wiping out the feudal in a genocidial pogram, if that is what is required.
I say, let us bury the expletive deleted feudals in the expletive deleted land they love so much.

It would be a good idea, for such a leader, to start a tradition of public hangings after Friday prayers in all the towns and cities of Pakistan and to hang a dozen or so people each week; nothing motivates people more than to see someone dying kicking, dirtying themselves with their own excrement.

Now, let us turn to the military and let us have a would be leader of Pakistan purge it of all the minds, which exist in it and place it at a higher level than the importance of the state itself.

I must emphasis this point very clearly and forcefully. In order for Pakistan to have a functioning democracy and a representive government, with liberity and justice for its people, a would be leader of Pakistan would have to demolish all the intelligence services that exist within Pakistan.

The existence of an intelligence service, unless it is subservient to the law and is subordinate to the elected representatives and is held accountable by them, will always be a threat to the individual liberities of the people (in any country of the world).

The military in Pakistan has to made, by hook or crook, empathic to the understanding that it exists under the rubric of a state’s interests and it is not the job of the military to weave fantasies as to what are the interests of the state. The purpose of a soldier is to die for the country and it is the purpose of the leader to tell that solider how to die for his country and this needs to be made clear to the military mind in Pakistan.
Qualifications of a leader? The qualifications are not as important as the desire to institute a positive change in Pakistan and not to brook dissent to that change.

Edmund Burke once said a true leader is that person, who when he realizes that what the people want is wrong, acts in the best interests of the people by disobeying them and doing what he knows to be the best for them!

Pakistan must be allowed to be burned, to the third degree, with the fires of its self-created intolerances and it must be allowed to sink, deeper, into the hopelessness of a rule of jungle and life must be allowed to become so uncertain that the average mind of a Pakistani understands what it means to live in a lawless society and why laws are need and more crucially, why laws must be respected and this repect must be for man made law and not God’s laws, which will only create, and do create, exceptions to the rule of law and actually undermine it.

Religion must be allowed to kill in Pakistan until that point in time, when the people themselves understand that religion is a man made doctrine for propagating an intolerant brand of moral terroism and they are so fed up with religion and its hypocrisy, that they themselves seek to distence themselves from its rituals and commandments and intentions.

A would be leader must be willing to watch the death of Pakistan, in its present form, and must be willing to re-create a new reality by the force of sheer ruthlessness and will power.

I only see a stubborn refusal to compromise with the conventional wisdom and a desire to take Pakistan by the horns and make it yield to progress and change as a solution, because at the present state of affairs, the idea of a national consensus is a wet dream in Pakistan, because our present leadership has the minds of a spoiled child and is selfish to the core.

The reason corruption is such a death knell for Pakistan is not because of corruption itself, but because it is a selfish corruption that exists in Pakistan, and which traces its roots to the sustainment of a life style that cannot be afforded through legal and normal means. The idea of corruption and its impetus in Pakistan comes from living a life style beyond a person’s means and to bridge the gap, between the costs of that life style and to pay for it, corruption is the mode of expediency meet the needs of that life style, because we all have expectations to live beyond our means.

Corruption in Pakistan will only end when Pakistanis are made to live within their financial limits. Period.
All of the problems in Pakistan, from A to Z, can be solved, but the question still waits for an answer if there is a will to solve them?

Therefore, I favor a philopher-king, who understands the problems of Pakistan, understands the vunerabilities of the people of Pakistan and their intellectual insecurities and knows the solution and is not afraid to impose a reign of tryanny and is not unafriad of being hated and disliked.

The problem with military rulers is that they always wish to be liked and wish to have popular legitimacy and it is this Achilles’ Heel of their own flawed perceptions, which gives them their destined tragic character flaws assuring their eventual failures. Same thing with the civilian politicans; they too have a sense of a personal narcissistic streak and for its sake, will not make difficult choices.

No; what Pakistan needs is a person, as a leader, capable of unimaginable will power and the first test of this will power has to be such a leader’s personal rejection of everything which Pakistan presently stands for, because it is wrong and then, the capacity to change it regardless of the sacrifice needed.
Pakistan needs a philosopher-king, who understand the irony of doing evil in the name of good; who understands that in order to create, you must destroy.

I am being pragmatic and if I had wished to be idealistic, I would have continued to harp about Jinnah and trying to force the future existence of my country according to the expectations of a dead man.
Is there a person in Pakistan, who can reject the role of Islam in Pakistani politics and also reject the memory of Jinnah and has the will to move forward, for the sake of Pakistan, without the need to justify the future of Pakistan on the basis of Islam and Jinnah?

In Response to Rabia Mughal, Express Tribune

Rabia, the only hardline stance now left in Pakistan is the total rejection of religion. Can you do this? This is the only hardline stance left now in Pakistan! How long will you appease religion in Pakistan and hope that it will leave you alone? How long will we play the osterich and pretend that danger does not exist? Religion is a problem in Pakistan and Pakistan has reached a stage of its existence, where every Pakistani has to ask: Islam or Pakistan? They have to make a choice. If you decide for Pakistan, you will have to remove Islam and religion from every aspect of the society and if you wish to keep Islam in Pakistan, then be prepared to see the end of Pakistan.

This is the only stance left and the frog died a long time ago. The frog died when all this was happening and no one said anything and this rot started in 1949, with the Objectives Resolution, which was the death certificate of Jinnah’s Pakistan. Pakistan’s death at the hands of religion was well documented in the Munir-Kiyani Report (please read that if you wish to understand the role of a political religion in destroying a state). Then came General Ayub Khan and his witch hunts of communists and leftists and liberals, which only opened up the political space for the religious right. Then came Z. A. Bhutto appeasing the clerics and declaring Pakistanis as non-Muslims and passing constitutional amendments to legalize religious discrimination. Bhutto set the stage of General Zia-ul-Haq and by this time, the clerical right in Pakistan was so emboldened and Zia so desperate for political legitimacy, that Pakistan was turned into a theocracy by an agreement of mutual understanding. After Zia, no one dared to stand up to the monster that was created and even Pervaiz Musharaf, retreated before the wrath of the religious right.

Can you dare to draw the line in the sand against Islam, as a self-confessed Muslim, and stand up against it? This is the only last hardline stance that will matter now and if you are not prepared for this, then be prepared to live in a Pakistan where you and your ideas will not be welcomed; where you will be judged as a Muslim according to the defination of someone who decides whether you are or you are not a Muslim worthy of living in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Is this acceptable to you?

To Sardar Khan

Why do you drag religion into every issue to promote your hatred? You say Islam is a religion of peace and yet, you kill those who disagree with you. Pakistan is not an Islamic state. Pakistan, under your version of Islam, is an Islamic despotism, where a person is judged by man-made laws and not the laws of God.

The majority of the people in Pakistan may be Muslims, but that does not mean in any sense of the word that they are right. The majority of the Germans also supported Hitler and his policies of Nazism. Did that make Hitler and his Nazism right for Germany? Should the Germans have simply accepted his rule and not challenged it? When Hitler and his Nazi cohorts passsed the Nuremberg laws in 1934, was that right?

The decision of a majority, if not balanced with the rights of a minority, is a legal justification for trynny. Pakistan may be an Islamic republic today, but what happens tomorrow if there is a change in the Pakistani opinion and the majority votes for a secular Pakistan? Will you then accept the decision of the majority? What makes you believe that Pakistan will always be an Islamic republic? Have you seen the end of time that you can make such a claim?

All Muslims honor Prophet Muhummad (PBUH). The question is who gave you and your ilk the right to decide how other Muslims should honor Prophet Muhummad (PBUH) and force them to honor him only in the manner prescribed by you? Who gave you the right to tell other Muslims how to follow their religion?
You say that our will not change anything, but then when have you and your band of killers have ever bothered to listen to the will of those, who have dissented from your version of Islam? You have killed all those you have disagreed with you, because you have no arguments against their reason and so, you silence them with bullets and threats and lies. You and your bunch of religious thugs have denied the right to others to express their will and then you have the incredible audacity to come and inform that our will will not change anything?

For the last 64 years, you have tried and failed to impose your fanatical Islam upon us and the reason why you have failed is because it is our will that is resisting you and it is a will that will keep telling us to resist you, because this is not your Pakistan and we do not want your Pakistan forced down our throats. Our will, even in the darkest times of dispair, is firmly rooted in the dream of a tolerant and a progressive Pakistan as envisioned by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and you may kill us as much as you wish in a physical sense, but you can never kill the dream and the idea of that dream in our hearts and minds.

Who gave you the right and the courage to tell us to be “good Muslims”? Who gave you the authority to judge us as Muslims? Who gave you the power to define who is and who is not a Muslim? When you and Muslims like you kill other Muslims in the very name of religion you and people like you profess, what makes you believe that you are a good Muslim yourself?

When in your actions, deeds and thoughts, you stand for everything which the religion you claim to represent rejects in its teachings, what makes you think you are good a Muslim and better than all other Muslims in the world?

Then, once more, in a brazen act of arrogance you lecture us to find peace by becoming a good Muslim. There can be no peace and there can be no good Muslims when narrow minded, bigoted, intolerant, rejectionist and morally nihilistic people like you and your blood thirsty supporters kill anyone who does not agree with you and your interpretations of Islam.

For Muslims to find peace and be considered as good, people like you and your intolerant mindsets have to be learn to be tolerant to the voices of dissent within Islam. It is people like you with insecure minds that are preventing Muslims from living in peace and as long as illiterates like you judge Muslims, there can be no good Muslim in this world because the real blasphemers are you and your compartiots who profane the religion by judging who is and who is not a Muslim.

Blasphemy laws are man made laws and they will be changed and they can and will be repealed, because they are imperfect, unjust and open to misuse and abuse by people like you and those who support views like yours.

Only a person, steeped in their own self-righteous sense of arrogance, ignorance and disdain will ask others to campaign for their proper implementation, but then encourage others to kill the very people who want to implement them in a proper way and prevent these laws from being abused.

The real blasphemers are people like you who use the blasphemy laws not to protect the honor and dignity of Prophet Muhummad (PBUH), but to protect your own political Machiavellianism justified in the name of Islam.

A Reply

The course of the battle, so to speak, will only work if there is a real realization in Pakistani middle classes that there is a need for change and that before it is too late, a course correction is sorely needed.

In a way, your comments are more instructive than the debate, because they do offer a tangible positive prove of how change can be implmented in Pakistan. The idea of change itself is only a small part of the problem in Pakistan. The bigger problem is that there is no clear idea as to how this change will be achieved? The more, ingrained, and more entrenched problem in Pakistan is not the lack of leadership, but the complete ignorance as to what is the idea of a leadership; a process of what is a leadership and by which a leadership is understood and what is the purpose of a leadership?

Leadership, and to be a leader, does not mean to simply lead the people. The role of a leader within the idea of a leadership is more complex than just being at the head of a movement or sitting on top of a pryamid of a hierarchy. The real challenge of the leadeship is not to lead the people, the organization or any such entity, which a person commands in any particular direction, but to personally believe in the course of action itself and to make others believe in it too, to the the point that they start to identify with those aims as their own and start to believe in those ideas as their very own.

Pakistan has no geninue leadership in general let alone in times of crisis and Pakistan will never have a leadership worthy of the moment. The leadership of Pakistan does not believe in Pakistan and it still thinks that Pakistan will not last as a country; it does not believe in the idea of Pakistan. It is this reason and the lack of faith in the durability of Pakistan, which prompts the people in power to financially milk Pakistan and horde their investments outside of Pakistan. If the leadership of Pakistan, of all shades and hues, really believed in the longevity of Pakistan as a nation, they would not be having foreign bank accounts or be in the procession of dual nationalities.

The idea of Pakistan, to a Pakistani leadership, can be judged in the opportunity that it presents and that opportunity is to secure their future and the future of their children while they have the means; the right to power and influence within Pakistan.

It is for this reason that you have corruption, embezzlement, nepotism, disregard for laws, an economic Hobbesian state of nature, and a general prevailing sense of despondency and dispair about the future. It is this reason; the state of Pakistani mind, which dreads the future because it does not believe in the idea of future as one promising hope, that it reverts to the past and rejoices in the safe comfort of the past. The people, who govern and rule Pakistan do not believe in the future of Pakistan and that is why, they see their turns in power as to make the most while the situation is favorable to them and save for a rainy day, when all this “make hay while the sun shines” times will end.

Therefore, the question of a leader or even a leadership navigating Pakistan out of trouble does not even arise, because there is no credible subsitute to the lack of leadership in Pakistan. There is no significant difference between Nawaz Sharif or Asif Ali Zardari or Altaf Hussein or a secular or a religious or a military or an economic leadership in Pakistan as they do not believe in Pakistan and only see Pakistan as a golden chance to a better life for themselves and their progeny.

Hence, and to the point of the your post, who will lead this charge against the enemy and who will stand out from the crowd? A leader, in order to lead the people towards a cause that promises change, has to personally believe in the cause itself.

The idea of opposition for the sake of opposition is not really an opposition as much as it is an admission of not having any viable alternatives to offer as a subsitute to what is being opposed. The above statement, once understood in the context of the Pakistani political system, becomes an insightful explanation to the logic behind the mantra of “a friendly opposition” which is the political expression in vogue in Pakistan and therefore, there is no difference between a government in power and an opposition in Pakistan, because they have no political differences and only see politics as a game to be played; waiting for their turn to make the most while they have a chance and it is because of this reason, that Pakistani politics has been characterized more by policies of an ad-hoc nature (short term) than by any policies of long term planning.

It is this reason, which encouages secular parties to make alliances with the religious parties and for the religious parties to have no qualms of being part of secular politics, because what brings these two different strands of ideology together is the common interest based on the idea of opportunism.

There is no need to debate the issue that Pakistan needs to change and that religion has rotted body politic of Pakistan, but there is a very urgent need to debate the question as to from where will a leadership come to tackle these problems, which believes in the idea of Pakistan itself?

The failure to answer this question or to provide an answer to this quandry will open the situation to a more complex, consequential and a more dangerous element of uncertainity. Most Pakistanis do not even comprehend the seriousness of this situation; of a lack of credible leadership in Pakistan and what it foretells for the future of Pakistan.

It is for this reason, that there will no meaningful change in Pakistan after the murder of Salman Taseer because whereas the moderate elements of the Pakistani society may desire change, they have no clue as to how to articulate the process of that change and like chickens, with their heads cut off, they run in circles wishing for a change and why they will always welcome the man on the horseback that comes promising change.

There will be a new dawn for Pakistan, but for now we must suffer the long night of darkness and it will be only through a most vile, inhumane act of cruelty that we will come to end of our national schadenfreude. Pakistan is presently fighting a religious civil war and it will suffer and it will continue to suffer till the common person in Pakistan makes a wilful decision to change his/her mind and realizes the cause of their common suffering and makes amends to the ideas of the past, which have reaped such a bounty of misery.

The end will come not from alienation of an idea about religion and politics, but from a sense of alienaton based the idea of the role of an individual within a religion. Change, from the old paradigms to a newer one, cannot happen even if there is a leadership to make that change possible, because change can only happen if the old system is weak and is incapable to resist the changes being forced upon it and until the ways of the old in Pakistan and the thinking associated with them are not weakened, change will be remain a chimera in Pakistan.

In end, this question is for the Pakistanis to decide as to what they really want and what are they prepared to sacrifice for the sake of change.

Look at the comments on PTH itself by the so-called liberal, moderate, well educated Pakistanis saying “Pakistan ka Khuda hi Hafiz”! I hope you see the irony! One has to believe in the idea of change and for people in Pakistan to give up on the idea of Pakistan, what is there left to change when you do not believe in Pakistan itself?!?!?

There are a couple of lines from the Broadway play, Les Miserables, which I think are very apt to the times in Pakistan and to the Pakistanis as a question?

Is there a new world you long to see? Will you stand up on the barricades with me and fight for that world; for your right to live in that world?

As said before; every Pakistani has to make a personal choice on which side of the barricades they wish to stand and what do they wish to fight for; a new world and the dawn of a new brighter day or a night of an endless darkness?

They say that when a person comes to the edge of an abyss and looks down, the abyss looks back at him/her and that is when they find their character. Pakistan is at the edge of that proverbial abyss and it is time to find our character and step into the arena and make that which we wish possible.

Happy New Year

In hopes that the year 2011 is much better, peaceful, prosperous, safe and secure than 2010 for all of us.

As usual, my New Year's Resolution, which has remained constant since the last twenty odd years and which I am pleased to stay that I have managed to keep, is not have any New Year's Resolutions!