EDITORIAL: It’s that time of the year again when the nation takes stock of its journey as a one-of-a-kind Muslim atomic power with a parliamentary democracy and an open economy. Yet, for some reason, so many decades of this annual ritual have still left us searching for our true identity and the direction the federation was meant to take.
So perhaps, at 75 years, it’s finally time for consensus on when, not if, we really went off the rails and what would be required to bring us back on track; if at all that is still possible. It’s no good to look at the top of the food chain for answers. Because the political elite, all of it, could not be more naked in its shameless self-interest and obsession with gaining or hanging on to power; even if it means adding fuel to the fire ravaging the economy and threatening the very survival of the state.
Right now the most important thing is avoiding catastrophic economic collapse, even sovereign default, but that is also precisely why we must also calculate, down to the minutest detail, just how and why we became one of the most indebted countries in the world with nothing to show for it except the fifth-highest population growth rate and abysmal health and education indicators even by third world standards.
We started with nothing after Partition, and only one urban centre that could qualify as a properly functioning city, Lahore. And it was only the rush of refugees that turned the sleepy port town of Karachi into the financial hub that never slept.
Yet the country was able to boast a pretty decent civil service, foreign service, and defence service barely a couple of decades into its existence.
But we also struggled with drafting a constitution, determining what kind of Muslims we wanted to be, how central Islam should be in matters of governance, and what place the military should have in the body politic.
And it doesn’t speak too well for a democracy that one wing’s refusal to accept the result of a genuine election unleashed a frenzy of horrors that led to the loss of one part of the country? And then, when the constitution was held in abeyance for the first time, state policy took a hard right turn, drenched in religious slogans which helped score a temporary strategic victory in Afghanistan but caused fractures, fissures, sectarian spasms and blood thirsty terrorism that the country suffers from to this day.
We enjoyed two distinct decades of democracy around this and the second time the constitution was held in abeyance, but those years are remembered for corruption, kickbacks, politics of opportunism and dirty money, not universities, colleges, hospitals and social and practical infrastructure that countries stand and grow on.
One by one almost all countries in south and east Asia, from China to Korea to Vietnam to even Bangladesh, improved their social and economic outlook while ours regressed with time. It’s very clear now that our narrow academic base limits entrepreneurship which, in turn, keeps manufacturing, production and things like export earnings trapped in a very limited band. And this is a very vicious cycle that no administration so far, military or democratic, has had the vision to even appreciate and understand, much less address.
Now we’re in over our heads and the only thing keeping us barely above water is a lifeline from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) that can run dry at the first sign of political upheaval or extending relief to the common man in the form of subsidies or tax relief.
And whether or not we can manage to keep up with the debt repayment schedule, which is becoming more demanding with time, is pretty much a coin toss and depends on how much longer other countries and institutions keep giving us money that they know for sure will go into a black hole and never come back. It will not be used to erect anything that makes more money and it will never be paid back.
Sadly, the headlines will still tell you of alleged foreign conspiracies and attempts to provoke mutinies in institutions, with no focus on the country’s real problems. Three quarters of a century after the fateful division of the subcontinent gave us our prized freedom, it seems we’ve been sleepwalking into a nightmare instead of living in the dream that Pakistan was supposed to deliver.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022