Who’s To Blame?
There was a famous story circulating in Ghizer district, as the district is known for its notorious road replete with history of accidents taking countless lives over the years. Once a driver who was in the public transportation business ran into a major accident on Ishkoman road. He luckily survived but his vehicle was completely damaged. He then had to put a lot of money in it to bring it back to operational condition. Following the repair work, he finally was back on the roads. One day he was on the same road at the same spot while explaining the passenger his misfortune, he coincidently ran again into another accident right where he faced similar fate multiple times. Now be it his bad luck or the superstitious metaphysical forces that wanted his fate to be that way, in which most of us believe given the oral tradition of story telling which shapes our beliefs in these forces. For now, at least he blamed his fate.
Years later it was revealed that many accidents happened on this spot but there was no compilation of statistics. Later the accidents were attributed to the faults in the construction of the road that has a sharp turn that allows vehicles to easily slide off road specially in bad weather conditions.
The moral of the story is: the driver blamed his fate not knowing there could be this mismanagement in the construction and as we are told to believe in our fate that stems from our superstitious beliefs rather than reasoning, what went wrong and how it could have been pre-empted without any repercussions for the generations to come.
A similar kind of story could be seen everywhere and in every aspect of our country. And that politics translates into our governance structure and politics of GB and even to the very core of our local politics (village politics) that bares us from having a long-term vision to rectify our problems. We don’t learn from our mistakes, and this has led us to a situation where we are standing now; a lost nation, or a herd without any sense of direction to be more precisely!
I may sound very pessimistic, but the truth is there is nothing in a good shape as of today in our country. I do not want to give you false hopes. The reality is a fragile governance structure, no devolution of power, concentration of power in few hands, dystopian civil society and what not. Our education, health, infrastructure, law and order, political instability and our economy is in such a bad shape that we at are not only at the brink of a default, but I see no way to come out of it. Countries like Japan defaulted during WW2 but they had a system in place that completely transformed their society. The question is who is to be blamed for all of this?
Should we blame our politicians? Whose job is to secure votes on religious lines, ethnic lines, linguistic lines with huge investment in the voting process that later results into corruption, rent seeking and kickbacks to compensate for this electoral investment. Far from their mandated task that is to make peopleistic policies, legislation and power devolution, they instead kept themselves busy playing in the hands of other ‘powers’, while stacking offshore wealth. Towering claims of being ‘custodians of democracy’, yet unwilling of letting someone else to lead out of their families as the dynastic politics of the country trends for 75 years now.
Should we blame our judiciary? Whose duty is to keep the constitution intact and enforce the law in its true spirit, but they instead piled up mountains of pending cases in their courts and making justice out of the reach of a common man. Always backing up the ‘doctrine of necessity’, and performance so poor that ranking below 100th number in the world for provision of justice. Despite all this they seek respect which otherwise you would be trialled under ‘contempt of court’. Furthermore, they’ve miserably failed to dispense their mandate of justice in the struggle between whom to appease, the politicians or the army bypassing constitution.
Should we blame our religious leaders? Who were supposed to eliminate elements of hatred from our societies and preach the real essence of Islam, but they instead become tools of spreading violence, sectarianism and penetration of religion into politics. We have all the evil existing in our society, yet these ‘leaders’ have the audacity to lecture the world on ethics and morality. Keeping the pluralistic nature of religious orientation, they instead work towards homogeneous trends, usually taking inspiration from the theocratic state.
Should we blame our media? In any democracy media is to play as the main tool of keeping an eye on the performance of government and to raise the voice of the masses. On the contrary our mainstream media has always been stooges of those in power, thus making billions in revenues. Spreading fake, propaganda and polarized news and no constructive debate to be seen on any platform. Despite all this they cry foul of ‘independent media’. The ideologies that are being disseminated through this partisan media secures the interests of the status quo and bares any normal citizen to think out of the parameters they are defining. I hope we will not turn towards fascism as this was the case in Mousseline’s Italy and Weimar Republic.
Should we blame our law enforcement agencies? Their primary responsibility is to ensure law and order, securing our borders and maintaining peace by all means. They have done everything else except maintenance of peace and keep our land safe from terrorists. They could be well explained as, jack of all and master of none! The executive power of that state is now turning into a RSA (Repressive State Apparatus) as Gramsci calls it, whose primary task has now been to coerce people to consent to the domains of power. The irony is, if you criticize any of the above entities, you are labeled as anti-democracy, anti-state, traitor, kafir, foreign agent and what not.
Last but not least, should we blame ourselves? We as citizens, do we abide by the law? Where does out morality stands? Have we committed to environmental causes and try to start reforms within ourselves. Are we as citizen aware of our rights? What we owe to the state? No we don’t! We don’t pay our due taxes, we don’t live as a civilized society be it in strikes, public demonstration. We don’t care about public properties, we are not sincere with our jobs, corruption has literally become part of our DNA, and yet we expect our leaders to be “sadiq and ameen”. I guess the coin has both sides. We can start the reforms within ourselves and let the state.
In a nutshell, everyone has in one way or another, lesser or more, played his/her role in the destruction of our country and dreams of our founding fathers. I am worried that this situation may last forever, unless we wake up, own up to our mistakes and learn our lesson, because it’s never too late. Otherwise just like the driver of Ishkoman we’ll keep blaming our fate with out any rational intervention into the causes and remedies.