BY GEORGE FULTON
For the past nine years I have been in a dysfunctional
relationship. My liaison started somewhat unexpectedly, quickly
becoming an all-consuming passionate love affair. My partner
reciprocated strongly, bestowing deep affection and adoration upon me.
Blinded by love, I was naďve to her failings. Yes, at times she was
self-destructive, irrational and grossly irresponsible but I hoped by
appealing to her nature’s better angles she could change. Instead, as
the years progressed, and, supported by her ‘friends’ in the media, she
corroded, simultaneously displaying signs of megalomania and paranoia.
Once the relationship turned abusive and I feared for my life, I decided
to call it quits. Today the divorce comes through. Her name is Pakistan.
And today I am leaving her for good.
This was not a difficult decision to make. In fact, I
didn’t make the decision. It was made for me. You do not chart your own
destiny in Pakistan; Pakistan charts it for you. It’s emigration by a
thousand news stories. I am aware that bemoaning the state of Pakistan
as a final shot appears churlish and arrogant. After all, I have the
luxury to leave – many others do not. Nor do I want to discredit the
tireless work of the thousands who remain to improve the lives of
millions of Pakistanis. They are better men and women than I. Pakistan
has also given me so much over the years. It was Pakistan who introduced
me to the love of my life. And it was upon her manicured lawns that we
married, and upon her reclaimed soil that we set up our first home. She
brought the love of a new family and new friends into my life. And it
was Pakistan that witnessed the birth of my son, Faiz – named after one
of her greatest sons.
She embraced me like no other gora post-9/11. I
appeared in a documentary/ reality series titled George Ka Pakistan.
It allowed me to explore the country. I ploughed fields in the Punjab,
built Kalashnikovs in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (probably couldn’t do that now)
and mended fishing boats in Balochistan. The culmination of the series
saw the then prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, confer Pakistani citizenship
upon me after the viewing public voted overwhelmingly to make me one of
them. I was their George. Fame and affection followed.
But that love was conditional. Conditional upon me
playing the role cast – the naďve gora. The moment I abandoned
the Uncle Tom persona and questioned the defined establishment
narratives – whether through my television work or columns –
excommunication began. No longer a Pakistani in the eyes of others, my
citizenship evidently was not equitable to others.
So, as I depart, I could go with my reputation tarnished
but still largely intact. Or I could leave you with some final words of
honesty. Well, true love values honesty far more than a feel-good
legacy. So here goes.
Pakistan, you are on a precipice. A wafer-thin sliver is
all that stands between you and becoming a failed state. A state that
was the culmination of a search for a ‘Muslim space’ by the wealthy
Muslims of northern India has ended up, as MJ Akbar recently pointed
out, becoming “one of the most violent nations on earth, not because
Hindus were killing Muslims but because Muslims were killings Muslims”.
The assassination of Salmaan Taseer saw not only the
death of a man but also represented for me the death of hope in
Pakistan. I did not mourn Taseer’s death. I did not know the man. But I
mourned what he represented – the death of liberal Pakistan. The
governor’s murder reminded us how far the extremist cancer has spread in
our society. A cancer in which I saw colleagues and friends on Facebook
celebrate his murder. A man murdered for standing up for the most
vulnerable in our society – a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. He
committed no crime. Instead, he questioned the validity of a man-made
law – a law created by the British – that was being used as a tool of
repression.
In death, the governor was shunned, unlike his killer,
who was praised, garlanded and lionised for shooting Taseer in the back.
Mumtaz Qadri became a hero overnight. But Qadri is not just a man – he’s
a mind-set, as eloquently put by Fifi Haroon. Fascism with an Islamic
face is no longer a political or an economic problem in Pakistan; it has
now become a cultural issue. Extremism permeates all strata and
socio-economic groups within society. Violent extremists may still make
up a minority but extremism now enjoys popular support. As for the
dwindling moderates and liberals, they are scared.
Pakistan does not require a secret police; we are in the
process of turning upon ourselves. But then what do you expect when your
military/ intelligence nexus – and their jihadi proxies – have used
religious bigotry as a tool of both foreign and domestic policy. It is
ironic that the one institution that was designed to protect the idea of
Pakistan is the catalyst for its cannibalisation. Christians, Ahmadis,
Shias and Barelvis have all been attacked in the past year. Who will be
next? Groups once funded and supported by the state have carried out
many of these attacks. And many jihadi groups still remain in cahoots
with the agencies.
So as I leave Pakistan, I leave her with a sense of
melancholy. Personally, for all my early wide-eyed excitement and love
for the country and its people, Pakistan has made me cynical,
disillusioned and bitter over time. I came here with high hopes,
adopting the country, its people and the language. I did find redemption
here – but no longer.
**
From the moment I arrived in Pakistan nine years ago,
the omnipotence of the military apparatus was self-evident. Yet, as I
leave, it is apparent it will be this institution, more than any other,
that will be the catalyst in this country’s eventual downfall. As Pervez
Hoodbhoy recently pointed out, rather than acting as a factor for
détente in the region, our acquiring the nuclear bomb in 1998
exacerbated our military arrogance. Kargil, the attack on India’s
Parliament and, more recently, Mumbai, have all occurred since we got
the bomb – attacks that couldn’t have been carried out without some
military/ intelligence involvement.
And yet, ironically, the military’s regional
self-importance belies our chronic servitude to the US. In addition to
being the largest landowner in Pakistan, the Pakistani army is the
world’s largest mercenary army. Look at the media storm created over the
Kerry-Lugar Bill for its supposed slight to Pakistani sovereignty. Yet
it is the army’s reliance on US military aid that has made Pakistan a
client state of the US. This inherent contradiction is not disseminated
in the media. Instead, the established narrative for our acquiescence to
the US is laid firmly at the weakness of our political class. As if it
was the politicians – and not the military leadership – who somehow
control Pakistan’s foreign policy.
Of course, the military/ religious right in Pakistan use
their proxies in the media to blame the Hindus, Americans and Jews for
all our sins. But those sins are mostly ours. Atiqa Odho, a friend, and
someone who truly wants the best for Pakistan, sent me a text message
after the detention by India Customs of singer Rahat Fateh Ali Khan.
“Rahat Ali Khan is not a criminal, he has become a victim of corrupt
trade practices in India that have singled him out to target the soft
image of Pakistan… Let’s not treat a music icon who has millions of fans
over the world as a common criminal.” The text had it all:
hyper-patriotism, paranoia, absolution of responsibility and a shot of
snobbery. Why shouldn’t he be treated as a common criminal if he was
avoiding tax? The attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team wasn’t a foreign
hand. It was a Pakistani hand. Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad
Amir were not brought down by some covert Anglo/ India plot but by their
own avarice. They cheated.
But the right’s hyper-nationalism is perhaps more
tolerable than the liberal elite’s disengagement and insouciance. Like
the right, the liberal elite believe all Pakistan’s woes belong to
others. But rather than the Hindu/ US/ Zionist paranoia of the right,
the liberals put the blame on the mullahs, the masses, the uneducated
and the unwashed – anyone but themselves. We – and I include myself
here, as this was my social milieu for the past nine years – are unaware
of our own hypocrisy.
My friends will condemn the cricketers but not the
society that actively encourages these lower-middle-class boys to cheat.
But why would they? Their families have gorged and benefited from this
society. Recently, at a coffee shop, I overheard a society begum, decked
out in designer clothes and glasses, bemoan the cricketing scandal. Her
ire was primarily directed at the boys for bringing Pakistan’s ‘good’
name into disrepute – not the cheating itself. She then harked back to a
time when the Pakistani cricket team spoke English well, as if good
English equalled with moral rectitude. But does she question how her
husband makes his money? For every Rs100 collected by the Federal Board
of Revenue (FBR) in taxes, it misses another Rs79 due to tax evasion.
The FBR estimates that the total revenue lost by the government as a
result of tax evasion comes out to Rs1.27 trillion for this fiscal year
and is equal to eight per cent of the GDP. According to the FBR, over 70
per cent of all taxes evaded are corporate income taxes. What’s the
difference between Salman Butt screwing his country for money and the
rest of us?
But liberal elite is a misnomer. We aren’t really
liberal. We want the liberal values of free speech and rule of law
without wanting to instil the economic and democratic mechanisms to
ensure them. We espouse liberalism but don’t practice the egalitarian
values – distribution of power and wealth – that underpin liberalism.
But then, the English liberal ‘elite’ has abdicated all
responsibility to govern in the past 60 years. Despite enjoying
unprecedented levels of wealth and education, we no longer believe it is
our duty as the best educated and most privileged in society to
contribute to its development. The English language has created a
linguistic Berlin Wall between us and the rest of the country. We remain
cosseted inside our bubble. Instead, we have ceded political space to a
reactionary, conservative, military, feudal and religious nexus.
Tolerating this because, in turn, they have left us alone. They have
allowed us freedoms that the rest of the country doesn’t have. Freedom
to get obscenely wealthy. Freedom to party at Rs10,000-a-ticket balls.
Freedom to dress how we like. But these freedoms come at a price. A
Faustian pact has been signed.
Even Pakistan’s intellectual elite has largely abandoned
its responsibility. An ideological vacuum occurred after 1971 when the
‘idea of Pakistan’ and the two-state solution failed. What filled the
vacuum over the succeeding decades have been a variety of parties with
their own vested self-interests – Zia ul-Haq, Islamists, the Saudis and
the US – trying to enforce their own idea of Pakistan. Today our
intellectual elite are too compromised – suckling on the teat of donor
money, scholarships and exchange programmes – to challenge the US
narrative.
Unfortunately, no one is immune to the ills that this
country subjects its citizens to. I have changed. Slowly, my values and
morals have corroded. But I don’t want that for my one-year-old boy,
Faiz. I want him to grow up in a society where guns are not an everyday
occurrence and his parents can openly hold hands.
After Salmaan Taseer’s assassination, my mother-in-law –
a hard-working, decent school principal who was born in Bombay and had
grown up in Dhaka before migrating to Pakistan – called me up. She had
seen three of her children leave Pakistan during the past 20 years. My
wife was the last one remaining. As she spoke, she sounded defeated:
“George, just jao. Jao.” So now I am going. Khuda hafiz,
Pakistan.
(George Fulton is a freelance print and broadcast
journalist. This article was published in two parts in The Express
Tribune on March 2 and 3, 2011.)
Courtesy: The Express Tribune;
http://tribune.com.pk