Perspective: We need some politics in Pakistan

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What passes as politics in this country has long been a stage-play, the theatre of the absurd where actors deliver punchlines without meaning a word.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The News Pakistan
By Talat Farooq | August 9, 2014

Political talk shows and the government-opposition bickering leave me wondering whether this is politics at all. Politics comprises both conflict and cooperation and the job of the politician is to use power judiciously to facilitate the use, production and distribution of human, material and natural resources.

Today, nearly 60 million people in Pakistan live below the poverty line vis-à-vis access to health, education clean water, sanitation, household assets and service delivery. About 19 percent of the population and 30 percent of under-five children are malnourished. Thirty-five percent of the 800,000 children who die every year in Pakistan fail to survive due to malnutrition. Furthermore, Pakistan has the highest maternal and infant mortality rate in the region.

According to reports, in Pakistan there is one doctor for 6,628 people, one hospital for 131,247 people and one dentist for 67,757 people. A 2012 World Health Organisation estimate shows that there are only 320 psychiatrists in Pakistan to deal with 176 million patients. Researchers point out that there is an epidemic of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Pakistan due to anxiety and helplessness induced by lack of basic necessities and an absence of psychiatric social work.

Pakistan’s overall population growth rate is 1.95 percent which is the highest in South Asia. The most important factor obstructing effective family planning is the lack of consistent supply of commodities and services.

Almost 50 percent of Pakistan’s adult population is unable to read or write. Thirty-two percent of children aged 5 to 9 years remain out of school and 17 percent of primary schools consist of a single room. Only 49 percent of government primary schools have electricity. Pakistan’s official unemployment rate for youth under 24 is 7.7 percent and the actual rate could be twice as much. And there is hardly any increase in social safety nets.

People are crushed under rising inflation and the loadshedding monster remains hale and hearty with up to 18 to 22 hours of electricity outages in the rural areas and up to 14 to 18 hours in the urban areas.

Politics is the art of ensuring that society is not reduced to a disarrayed and directionless muddle with violence and lawlessness going unpunished. Implementation of laws is meant to check base, animal instincts of man by diverting inherent human violent streaks into peaceful resolution of conflicts.

In Pakistan more than 45,000 civilians have been killed in terror attacks and thousands of others have been injured since 2006. Sectarian violence has claimed more than 1500 lives with upwards of 2000 injured since 2012 alone. Yet there is no evidence of state-run rehabilitation efforts. People are dying everyday in road accidents, industrial accidents, target killings, domestic violence, disease, starvation, lack of medical facilities, substandard medicines, food adulteration.

In 2013 as many as 2,576 rape cases were registered in Punjab alone – yet to date not a single rapist has been convicted and punished. Acid attacks became illegal in Pakistan in 2010 yet the law is rarely enforced encouraging continuity of the heinous crime. If people were to reach equitable resolutions on their own there would be no need for politicians or government. The real task of a politician, argues political theorist Miller, is to resolve conflicts that occur naturally between humans through a mechanism of civilised debate, discussion and rational compromises fundamentally aimed at social equilibrium.

Once Zarb-e-Azb achieves its military objectives the role of the civilian administration will become paramount in the rehabilitation of the IDPs and the reconstruction process. To ensure that Fata remains strong and free from terrorist activities long-term sustained measures based on economic, social and political uplift will have to be adopted. Do our leaders possess the requisite political will?

Above all, the issue of terrorism can only be resolved by transforming a particular mindset not only in Fata but in all of Pakistan. This, along with other strategies, will primarily require an overhauling of the existing educational system. Is any politician in government or opposition thinking about these crucial problems that have to be surmounted if we are to be at peace with ourselves?

Politics is no doubt the art of gaining and retaining power but this power is primarily granted to the rulers as a conduit for enforcing laws and policies to create a more organised society. Any activity that creates or perpetuates chaos and which empowers the few at the cost of the many is not politics. Governmental institutions are the visible embodiment of politics. If such institutions do not serve as guarantors to a stable society but are there to serve powerful lobbies at the expense of the weaker segments of the community then it is not politics. It is robbery on a grand scale. When ‘politicians’ support their party’s militant wings and drug and land mafias or use state apparatus to kill the innocent then it is not politics. It is terrorism.

Most of our foreign policy woes are consistently blamed on civil-military relations. Genuine political leadership would devise a counter-narrative through good governance to fundamentally alter the structure of this relationship – that would be politics in earnest for it would move beyond the rhetoric of “the supremacy of parliament” and actually make it happen.

A country where corruption is rampant in all walks of life; where tax exemption is for the rich; where mullah-economy that gathered momentum in the 1980s prospers unchecked; where the poor have hardly any access to justice, health or good education; where our constitutional right to life and dignity is violated by the powerful with impunity – such a country suffers from a serious dearth of genuine politics.

Politics implies empowering the masses to ensure a better society than the one in existence. In a political charade local government becomes an anathema and politics is about patronage, personality cults and dynasties. Real politicians will allow home-grown leadership to evolve from the grass-roots to bring communal harmony and social cohesion; sham leadership will never venture out of their comfort zones.

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi’s resignation letter to David Cameron says she has chosen to give up her position as Senior Foreign Office Minister over the UK government’s Gaza policy because “long after life politics is over I must be able to live with myself for the decisions I took or the decisions I supported.” That to my mind is the essence of politics – political power tempered with personal morality and personal accountability.

What passes as politics in this country has long been a stage-play, the theatre of the absurd where actors deliver punchlines without meaning a word. The rest of us are the spectators – now clapping, now booing while suspending disbelief willingly for to not suspend it would mean facing painful reality.

There is no real politics in Pakistan. And without real politics there can be no real democracy. Unless there is genuine political leadership that can think and act as the true servant of the electorate, genuine democracy will remain a dream – ‘heavy mandate’, ‘inqilab’ or electoral reforms notwithstanding.

The writer is a post-doctoral researcher at Birmingham University.

Email: talatfarooq11@gmail.com


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