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A
few years ago, I asked a very dear friend, Dupont Haider Hannafi,
who was the MD of a leading French pharmaceutical company in Pakistan,
"You have been here seven years now; what, in your opinion, is
the distinguishing feature of Pakistani community?" He went into
deep thought for a moment, looking at the ceiling, he finally said
softly, "Myopia." He was, of course, speaking with general
reference to the business community he mingled with but at one point,
dilating on it, he said, "most people cannot see beyond the end
of their noses." He was a Muslim of Algerian descent, a hybrid
of East and West with great compassion for Pakistan. He married a
local girl, groomed her into a lady of impeccable style and now he
is retired in France. He loved Pakistan; still that was his dispassionate
opinion. So I am not quoting a prejudiced critic here.
I have lived with this malady of the short term vision long enough
to have developed some random hypothesis that I wish to share with
readers today. Perhaps for my good fortune to have had a philosophic
grand father who kept stimulating the curiosity in me as a child and
a father who always thought 'out of the box', quite radically - both
were very religious in liberal sort of way - that I developed a habit
of plural thinking about life, quite comfortable at an early age with
uncertainties that emerge if one is to entertain contradictory ideas.
However, even my 'thinking' elders inadvertently pushed me into a
career I wasn't cut for and half a century later I am still trying
to find a path to where my better talents lie. This was not my individual
crisis; I have found every second person in this country to have suffered
this predicament. Career planning is not something anyone cares much
about in our society. Market opportunities, personal fancies of parents
and socio-political connections determine careers of young people,
far more than temperamental adaptability. So we find chemical engineers
running IT, bureaucrats turned journalists, doctors running bureaucracies
and soldiers running educational institutions.
When I started practical farming, my first priority was soil conservation
because that is what the real wealth of a farmer is in the long run.
Over couple of decades, my farm turned from a virtual desert to a
highly productive piece of land, while other farmers turned around
their fertile soils into a virtual desert. I would forego immediate
profits for future gains and I was considered a little woolly in the
head by fellow farmers. Today the 'desertification of Punjab' as I
term it, is proceeding rapidly due to wrong use of fertilizers and
unfit irrigation water without any soil conservation strategy. I have
not been able to draw anyone's attention to this serious crisis over
the past thirty years because I am talking long term; the disaster
is not immediate.
As I got into consultancy business, I found that the bane of the short
term vision ruled the planners. As Dr. Akmal Hussain once put it,
"When we as consultants used to talk about the long term we were
told to focus on the short term: Now we have ignored the long term
for so long and so much that even short term solutions are not viable."
When you look at the political developments over the past five decades,
in retrospect, it is one long story of myopic decisions, leading the
country from one disaster to another. Political thought is non-existent
because that entails long term thinking. The proclivity of running
to the lessons from the past is so strong that the society has stopped
living in the present, leave alone thinking about the future. Pick
up newspapers and journals and what do you find? Long diatribes about
petty, immediate political manoeuvres of no consequence. If we were
to sum up our political story it is quite simply a series of reactions
to short term decisions and actions. Power hungry politicians of the
fifties abdicated security issues to the military and their irreconcilable
differences paved way for military takeover - in the name of internal
security. Military rule of the sixties ignored social and regional
equity in pursuit of linear economic growth that created two reactions:
the separation of East Pakistan and rise of Bhutto's socialism. The
quasi-socialist seventies created fertile ground for retrogressive
forces that General Zia exploited in the name of Islam. Zia's legacies
pushed Pakistan into international isolation during the nineties and
harboured fanatical militancy which has now become a millstone round
the nation's neck.
The present regime is having to save face while backtracking over
past convictions on Afghan and Kashmir policies, which share the umbilical
cord with militant fanaticism. The irony of it all is that the grand
concessions being made today have exposed the ill-planned, short term
strategies of the past. For all the allegations and counter allegations
being hurled between the military and the civilian polity both are
guilty of endorsing policies when they were being drafted and executed
- exploding the nuclear device for example had a national consensus.
The latest confession about nuclear technology being leaked out by
individuals has put egg on military establishment's face; one place
where it cannot pass the buck to the civilians since it was the zealous
custodians of it all along.
To put it briefly, there hasn't been one long term decision or strategy
that Pakistan can show with pride to have had the desired consequences.
Wisdom is the ability to achieve desired results in the long run;
foolishness is the propensity to grab the immediate opportunity today
and harm oneself tomorrow. Enlightened self-interest is not as dazzling
as street-smart wizardry but it prevails in the end. Ask poor Zardari,
was it worth it?
Two hypotheses that may inflame chauvinistic passions provide clues
to the roots of national myopia. First is the theological ethos that
relegates this life to the short term in toto, the transitory; long
term is after life of infinite rewards. Real investment in the future,
therefore, lies in theological practices and ceremonial compliance
as negotiable instruments to heaven - not strictly true but that's
what people are made to believe by faith peddlers.
The second element of myopia has its roots in the specific historical
experience of the decades before independence. The existential situation
for Muslims of the subcontinent was traumatic in the period beginning
from 1857 till partition. They were born with a grand cultural and
political heritage of over a thousand years of global supremacy. They
had ruled India for over 700 years unchallenged, which had nurtured
a great sense of racial superiority. After the fall of the moghul
empire, that supremacy was eroded by the rise of Hindu economic ascendancy
and British colonial rule. Muslim aristocracy was reduced to symbolic
remnants of their past. Real power had drained out of their ranks.
In trying to compromise reality with inherited self-image they had
to find a new identity on the basis of human rights, not even as equals
but as a handicapped community.
The uncertainty and the terror that must have chilled their bones
are hard to imagine for us as the post-partition generation. I have
sensed the goose pimples on the soul of my elder generation as a sensitive
child and as an avid observer subsequently. It is an established psychological
phenomenon that a frightened man has no sense of the long term; his
attention is all focussed on the immediate escape from terror. Myopia
becomes a second nature since all faculties are required to cope with
the present. A man being chased by a rabid dog cannot stop short to
find the best vantage point to enjoy a beautiful sunset.
Something of that nature happened to the generation that struggled,
sacrificed and fought for a separate homeland of Muslims in India.
Having achieved their goal, the characteristics required for building
a nation were quite different from the ones that created it. And those
have not developed! Myopia has become an endemic flaw of the nation.
I have faith in the post-partition generation which is growing up
free of past phobias or distorted perceptions of the world around
them.
Iqbal Mustafa
16 January 2004
1361 words
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