Pakistan is facing poverty, hunger, overpopulation, environmental crisis, food shortages, water scarcity, militancy, economic degradation, inflation, currency devaluation, economic meltdown, etc. It is no surprise, and what it faces is its Karma, the path it took 75 years ago. Pakistani society was designed on a superiority complex. Pakistan made “hatred of India and Hindus” the litmus test of patriotism. No state has ever thrived on the hate agenda. The demand for the creation of Pakistan was the biggest lie ever spoken.
The sub-continent division raised animosity of people who made up 20 per cent of the world. The designers made Pakistan as a garrison state. It was to be a buffer state sandwiched between Communist Russia and China. Kashmir conflict was designed. Pakistan state was made to live in existential fear of an enemy. The straight line from Karachi to Dacca was 2700 km long, with ‘enemy territory’ in between.
Pakistan was structured on false beliefs and fear psychosis. It was nurtured by hatred, blood, loot and mass migration. Sane voices were culled, killed or died in its infancy. It got a disproportionately large Army which meant its democracy would remain under military threat. It was a melting pot of nationalities which were kept together under duress. It was meant that Bacha Khan would stay imprisoned almost whole his life & the army would have its own territory (Baluchistan) to conquer from day one.
Pakistan as a state was not a viable state economically or geographically & I am not prepared to accept that the British who are the architects of the whole of Asia, Middle East, Africa and American continent & created countries and nations on the world map did not know what they were doing? Be that Israel or Pakistan, the creators had strategic plans and ideas in place and knew that they were creating conflict zones. That was the need of global Military Industrial Complex, then.
Pakistan as an agricultural nation is geographically an impossibility without Indian accord on water sharing. Water bomb coupled with the population explosion is knocking on the door as an existentialist threat, but the Pakistanis are busy in trumpeting for Kashmir, Jihad and saving Islam, oblivious to the fact that nature favours no religion.
Democracy is a feature of an industrial, not feudal, society. When India became independent, it was still a largely feudal, agricultural country. In the 1960s, land reform and abolition of privy purses began the gradual demise of the grip of feudalism in India, whereas the 1957 martial law in Pakistan strengthened feudal in Pakistan. Ownership rights to the landless and bonded cultivators in India freed hundreds of millions from thousands of years of bondage. It helped the democracy to trickle down to the grass roots.
Huge feudal land holdings continue to exist in Pakistan. The cultivable land remained concentrated in few hands. The feudal lords and their allies constitute only five per cent of agricultural households and own 64 per cent of farmland. The remaining 95 per cent are only their political vote bank.
It is a country firmly under the clutches of the Military. From Bakeries to Banks, from Electricity to Gas, airlines to transportation, logistics to construction, junta is the omnipresent and omniscient God of Pakistan. 40 per cent of all the heavy manufacturing are owned by the junta directly. Pakistani generals are billionaires. A retiring a major-general can expect to receive on retirement a present of 240 acres of prime farmland, worth on average £600,000, as well an urban real estate plot valued at £1000,000.
Holding of elections can’t create democracy. As long as everything else remains colonial, feudal and medieval, you can’t get democracy. Elections are necessary but not sufficient; they alone do not make a democracy.
“Creating a democracy requires a free and independent country, an inviolable constitution, a sustained commitment of time and money to develop transparent executive branch accountable to competent legislature answerable to the electorate, a strong neutral judiciary, and a free press; all the necessary elements create a powerful Parliament. ”
This is what Professor Toynbee said in a lecture in 1959 in Peshawar University when Pakistan was already under its first martial law.
In her 1991 book, ‘Waiting for Allah’, Christina Lamb, described the conditions in Pakistan in the following lines:
“Twelve thousand more people will be born in Pakistan this day. Two thousand will be dead within a year. More of them will learn to use a gun than to speak the national language. Only a third will have access to clean drinking water and only 15 per cent will have sewerage. A quarter will go to school. Many will become heroin addicts. This is a country killing its own future.
“It is in this moment, in which the day has not quite decided how it will treat mankind, that Pakistan is trapped. ‘Islam in danger’ was the cry raised to justify the necessity of dividing India and inventing a country for Indian Muslims. Today in their very own homeland, Muslims need safeguarding from each other.
“(…) the needs of the masses will remain ignored because the gulf between the two groups is too wide. It would take a revolutionary to challenge the entrenched power structures. The only other way for these to be dismantled now would be for the country to break up”.
These quoted lines are as true today as these were 30 years ago.
In 1950, Pakistan was the 13th largest country. It is estimated that Pakistan will be the 3rd largest Population country by the year 2050. A large portion of the Population in Pakistan is under 14 years, and half of the population is less than 20 years. With a high fertility rate, and a huge difference between the birth rate and the death rate, the resources in Pakistan are inadequate to meet the needs of the people, which include health services, education and employment. There is a high unemployment rate in Pakistan due to a shortage of jobs. The labour force is continuously growing. Pakistan needs to create 2.3 jobs every minute to provide employment opportunities to the people of Pakistan. That’s what the Generals should be worried about. Since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, the army has not just defended state ideology but defined it, in two destructive ways. The country exists to safeguard Islam, not a tolerant, prosperous citizenry. And the army, believing the country to be surrounded by enemies, promotes a doctrine of persecution and paranoia.
The effects are dire. Religiosity has bred extremism that at times has looked like tearing Pakistan apart. The state backed those who took up arms in the name of Islam. Although they initially waged war on Pakistan’s perceived enemies. They began to wreak havoc at home. Some 60,000 Pakistanis have died at the hands of militants, most of whom come under the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The army, at last, moved against them following an appalling school massacre in 2014. Yet even today it shelters violent groups it finds useful. Some leaders of the Afghan Taliban reside in Quetta. Hafiz Saeed the head of Lashker Tayyaba, the perpetrator of in Mumbai attacks of 2008, which took 174 lives, remains a free man.
Pakistan has been harvesting what it sowed. The chicken have come home to roost. The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 was hailed as the Pakistani PM as a victory of Islam, as a defining moment of liberty of Afghans. The Pakistani generals who have always been the architects of Pakistan’s defence, economic and foreign policies repatriated more than 40,000 Taliban back to Pakistan’s tribal belt in the last 4 years. Since coming into power, the Taliban has defied Pakistan, which was their main benefactor during the insurgency against the United States military and the deposed Afghan Government.
Afghans challenge the Durand Line and have supported the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has killed thousands of Pakistanis and seeks to establish a Taliban-style, Shariah-compliant state in Pakistan. This has stunned Islamabad, which was operating on the assumption that the Taliban would be beholden to Pakistan out of gratitude for years of support. TTP is right in asking why the pill (of Islamism) is poisonous for Pakistan which they sold as elixir to the Afghans?
This recent rise of Taliban militancy has come at a very critical juncture for Pakistan, when they are facing economic meltdown. They don’t have enough petrol to run their military operations. Now even if the Pakistan army really wish to decrease their expenses on mobilisation of army, they would not be able to do it due to the threat from Taliban.
The current scenario means that every coming day will bring more misery and anarchy to those living in the boundaries of the country. The people living within the state of Pakistan are reaping the results of the bad Karma which they and their predecessors have garnered over centuries. I don’t absolve the poor people of Pakistan. They are actually more militant, bigoted and full of hate for Hindus than the educated class. It is the masses who would burn humans alive at the slightest allegation of blasphemy.
Time is ticking fast when the Tsunami of extremism, unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, and overpopulation would drown the military cantonments. No amount of sermons, tanks, mullahs, propaganda, judges, nukes, ISPR, TV channels, political stooges, ISI, bullets, jails, Islam, NAB, political engineering, would be able to help.
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