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Between ‘ghairat’ and strategy
An extraordinary event has taken place in Islamabad. Over two dozen Pakistani ambassadors and high commissioners, serving in the key capitals of the world, have asked the government to base its foreign policy on strategy and not on emotion. They were commenting on the post-Salala attack reactive measures against the Isaf-Nato forces in Afghanistan, while seeking to reassess Pakistan’s policy towards the US under the spur of an intense national emotion often called ‘ghairat’ by self-seeking politicians.
The Pakistan Army was never mandated to think strategically because of its weak state revisionism against a much stronger status quo India. Strategy would have involved an assessment of Pakistan as a geographic reality with a severely constrained economic base, depending on external military assistance which could only be applied in conflict through a breach of contract with the suppliers.
Today, the reality is that Pakistan remains a poor candidate for filling the Afghan vacuum after the US leaves the region. Its claim that it can influence the Afghan Taliban is spurious, which means that it has no leverage over any envisaged peace talks. It has no control over the Pakistani Taliban either. At most, Pakistan’s military can act as a spoiler with no guarantee that it will be able to secure the country against any future Afghan fallout.
People are refusing to pay their electricity bills and have destroyed Wapda offices. Teachers, nurses and railway workers are on the roads and are threatening to jam the cities if they are not given salary increases commensurate with the rate of inflation. The railway workers have vowed to take over the national railway system. The broken down national airline, PIA, is waiting for a big accident to happen. The coming ‘revolution’ in Pakistan promises to be a monumental act of vandalism.
The national consensus, however, is on ghairat drummed up by a ‘guided’ media. It is unfair to the people of Pakistan and it is unfair to the democratic system we are trying to run in Pakistan. Ghairat is a military slogan raised prior to plunging into war and does not suit a civilised nation. We must base our policy on considerations of Pakistan’s economy and not on national honour because there is nothing more dishonourable than being poor.
One older still
Goodbye ghairat
‘Ghairat’ (pride or honour), is a term that is often heard and used in the Pakistani media these days.
It is a term that reflects images and sounds related to the muscle-flexing, big-talking and huff-puffing ways of ultra-patriots, or in case of Pakistan’s electronic media – free-wheeling loud-mouthed charlatans playing the role of fiery dyed-in-wool patriots.
The scary bit is that it is this ghairat brigade that has ironically found itself at the centre of a society in turmoil – actually answering and addressing the many political, spiritual and ideological inquiries emerging from within a highly disturbed, battered and confused society.
Fed on various conspiracy theories and sheer political and historical myths cleverly created by intelligence agencies and pseudo-historians, most of the ghairatmand are no more informed than your average drawing-room punter – or worse, that young middle-class lad or lass who feels elated by thinking that he or she has covered all aspects of politics and religion with the help of a few lectures by a certified conspiracy crank or by watching a straight-to-YouTube ‘documentary’.
But alas, the state Pakistan’s society is in for these past few years, where hardly any positives come the way of the people (especially its youth), the concept of ghairat moulded with empty muscle-flexing and collective feel-good theories about our nationalistic and religious greatness, serves as a way for the people to pretend that all is not lost.
Honourable sloganeering and going around pin-pointing ‘enemies’ and traitors, blasphemers and ‘agents’ will not achieve much. In fact, it will achieve nothing other than making us one of the laziest people who spend most of their energy complaining or being paranoid on the one hand, or sweating out bombastic and passionate patriotic chants and some more talk about ghairat.
Such bubbles when they burst, hurt. In fact, they then leave those who had lived in these bubbles feeling stupid if not downright insulted. And it is nobody’s fault but their own.
But what happens when reality does come knocking? Look no further than the faces of the ghairat brigade in the media these days.
Always feeling cheated by the politicians, this time they felt cheated by even those whom they had praised of being equally ghairatmand (the shadowy ones).
The truth is it was these shadowy folks who actually began the ghairat spiel, feeding it into the public mindset through their willing mouthpieces in the shape of ‘security analysts,’ talk-show hosts, anchors and right-wing politicians with weak electoral prowess.
The shocking (but not surprising) verdict in the Raymond Davis case has once and for all exposed the utter fallacy and meaninglessness of what was the Pakistani media’s latest ideological hoax called ghairat.
This country has witnessed many such hoaxes, sometimes in the name of Islam, sometimes accountability and each time these hoaxes have fallen flat on their faces, making the nation look like a bunch of emotional fools incapable of handling any issue with reason, pragmatism and sense.
It is time we say goodbye to this hollow ghairat. We must find honour, dignity and respect through constructive work in the fields of economics, science and the arts, instead of looking for ghairat by crying out war chants, paranoid accusations and waving our skinny wrists and fists while pretending to ride our way to ghairatmand glory on our much cherished nuclear missiles.
But first we must erase everything related to bin Laden from our country,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said.
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