Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Asif Ezdi
NNWFP Chief Minister Amir Haider Hoti announced on April 21 that the government was facing a revolt in the province and that the salaries of the police were being doubled to cope with this threat. Hoti's warning calls to mind a similar foreboding expressed by the king of France at the time of the French Revolution. On July 12, 1789, two days before the storming of the Bastille, when the duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt warned Louis XVI of the state of affairs in Paris, the king is said to have exclaimed, "This is a revolt." The duke's reply: "Non, sire, c'est une révolution." ("No, majesty, it is a revolution.")
In a revolt, only the ruler is toppled as a result of a popular uprising. But in a revolution, the entire ruling class is replaced. In our history, we have only known coup d'états, but neither a revolt nor a revolution. We do not know yet whether we are seeing the beginnings of a revolt or of a revolution in Pakistan. But whatever it is, it is certainly not a law and order problem and it is not going to be stopped by raising the salaries of policemen.
Our newspaper columns, airwaves and cyberspace have been saturated with the bloviations of our "liberal" commentators of different stripes chattering endlessly about the state being threatened by Islamic militants and extremists. In a rare display of unity, the apologists for our political class have also been saying the same thing. Hillary Clinton would be pleased that her call to the Pakistanis to speak out against the Taliban has been heeded.
Following in the footsteps of Musharraf, who not so long ago used to wax eloquent about how his brand of military dictatorship stood for enlightened moderation, the self-appointed protagonists of our hard-won democracy have been lamenting how our modern, enlightened way of life is being challenged by obscurantism and fundamentalism, when actually they are mostly defending only their class interests. Few, if any, votaries of this new enlightened moderation have pointed out that the Taliban movement in Swat has been able to win support among so many young men because the state has failed them, massively and comprehensively.
To portray the ferment in Swat as a medieval backlash against modernism is either a blinkered view or a deliberately misleading one. It ignores or tries to cover up the fact that the wellspring of Islamic militancy in Pakistan is to be found in the alienation of the mass of the population by a ruling elite which has used the state to protect and expand its own privileges, pushing the common man into deeper and deeper poverty and hopelessness. Past governments, whether military or civilian, dictatorial or democratic, have been little more than convenient tools of the privileged few for perpetuation of the status quo.
What has changed now is that people are much more aware of their rights – and their power. The availability of uncensored information on television has widened their horizons. In much of NWFP, the Afghan jihad gave them access to military training and modern weaponry: the Kalashnikov, the rocket launcher and the machine gun. With an annual population increase of four million in the whole country and an economy which is stagnant, there is a fast growing army of unemployed angry young men waiting to be recruited.
The turmoil in Swat and in the adjoining areas is being portrayed by some as a contest between obscurantism and enlightenment, between bigotry and tolerance and between extremism and moderation. Actually, it is more like a movement of the common man against vast disparities in wealth and the failure of the authorities to provide justice, jobs and those essential services like education and health for which governments are supposed to exist. In some areas at least, it has pitted landless tenants against wealthy landlords and there are reports that big landowners are being forced to leave the valley. Once such a movement gains momentum, it acquires its own uncontrollable dynamic. As Joseph de Maistre, a French political philosopher, wrote in 1796, it is not men who lead revolutions, but it is the revolution which employs men.
The appeal of the sharia and Islamic justice gives the Taliban an unparalleled ideological motivation. As the Persian saying goes, ham khorma wa ham sawab ast. There are rewards both in this world and the next. It is this combination of revolutionary and religious zeal which makes the Taliban such a formidable force. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair came close to the truth in a speech on April 22 in which he likened militant Islam to revolutionary communism for its tenacity. It would not of course be the first time that what began as a religious movement also acquired the character of a socio-economic upheaval. Examples can be found in the history of most civilisations.
The Swat deal, it has been said, signifies a retreat from Jinnah's Pakistan, that it is a negation of his vision. A Pakistani journalist has equated the "capitulation in Swat" with the surrender document signed in Dhaka in 1971, incidentally a comparison first made by a retired colonel of the Indian army by the name of Harish Puri in an op-ed in this newspaper. All this is shocking, because it suggests that before the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation, Pakistan was well on the way to becoming the country of Quaid-e-Azam's conception. Nothing could be farther from the truth, because the retreat from Jinnah's Pakistan and the betrayal of his vision began much earlier. It started shortly after his death, continued under successive civilian and military governments and accelerated under military dictators, reaching its culmination with Musharraf. The responsibility for this betrayal lies not with the Taliban or Sufi Muhammad but largely with the same class which is now howling the loudest.
Fundamental to the Quaid's vision of Pakistan was the concept of Islamic social justice. But we have seen none of that in the policies of the government in the last six decades. Instead, the main role of the state has been to enable the ruling class to keep its hold on power, privilege and national wealth. The gap between a thin upper crust of the rich and the vast majority who live in privation is growing. Greed and rapacity have now been officially sanctioned by the NRO. An ordinary Pakistani born into destitution has little chance of breaking the shackles of poverty. The machinery of government, the political system and the upper classes are all arrayed against him.
In most countries, there is a single universal education system for all, which helps to blunt class differences. In Pakistan, not only is the level of school enrolment abysmally low, but there is a stratified school system which replicates and consolidates the class divisions. The elites send their children to the best schools which are beyond the means of the common man and which generally ensure a secure place in the system in later life. For the others, there are either the government schools or the madressas. Even the most talented of those who go to a government school find it hard to break the glass ceiling which keeps them down in the job market. And the most gifted of those educated in madressas become Taliban.
To accuse those who have risen against our exploitative socio-economic system of obscurantism is scandalous. In reality, it is Pakistan's ruling class, desperately clinging to its privileges, that is seeking to preserve an outdated medieval order. They are the ones who stand for obscurantism. We do not yet have a full-blown class conflict but the genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back in.
If – and that is a very big if – our ruling elite and the government are smart, they will have been jolted out of their complacency by the Swat deal and will have focussed their minds on issues of social justice. But that is unlikely. At least, they have been warned. Thank you, Sufi Muhammad.
The writer is a former member of the Pakistan Foreign Service. Email: asifezdi@yahoo.com
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