A system has crashed

Ahmed Quraishi

We’ve just seen the collapse of government and the helplessness of bankrupt political elite in Pakistan. Pakistanis have just seen one of the most defining moments in their political history. Almost the entire political system has been swept away with the floods. Those Pakistanis who were not directly hit by tragedy have been hit by the second worst thing that could have happened: possibly a total loss of faith and trust in a political system that has been tried, tested and failed. Our condition begs change. This is the stuff that revolutions are made of. Our rains and floods could never have turned into a tragedy worse than Haiti and Kashmir earthquakes and the Indian ocean tsunami combined if not for the manmade factors: an entire government and administrative structure that failed to offer any contingency planning before the tragedy or rapid response after. Village after village, Pakistanis saw how cardboard local administrations raised white flags and handed power over to the Pakistani military [army, navy, and air force] at the slightest hint of challenge. I still can’t get over the video footage of our Sindh chief minister who, having been alerted by the Punjab government about floods, headed his way, stood before a camera to laugh along with his aides at how Punjab opened the waterways now that there is a flood, a thinly-disguised reference to the water disputes among provinces. He and his aides thought it was funny to shirk responsibility in this fashion and play politics. Sure enough, days later his administration sat helpless as the army seized Sukkur Barrage and took responsibility for making the hard decisions. For two weeks now, victims and volunteers are yet to see a single elected representative out to help in post-disaster operations anywhere across flood-hit areas of Pakistan, especially in those areas where ‘dynastic’ elected politicians dominate. In fact, the most common complaint aid volunteers heard from the victims is that politicians have been busy worrying about their feudal landholdings. This is nothing to say of economic collapse and how most of the hundreds of millions of dollars that our government is soliciting from the world will disappear in private pockets a few years later leaving millions of flood victims fester into social wounds that will haunt Pakistan for decades to come. We’ve already seen how the Musharraf government fared in dealing with the 2005 Kashmir earthquake reconstruction. Between 2006 and now, we should have had in place a first class disaster management and rapid response system. Instead we have an agency called NDMA with a bulging bureaucracy whose seniors enjoy juicy perks and TV airtime and zero utility. This is a failed system because it is marked less by politics and organization and more by violence and chaos. For example, the monsoon rains could have been a boon had we built dams. But our current crop of politicians, knowing they have nothing else to attract voters, have been whipping up linguistic divisions among Pakistanis and raising hysteria over how one dam or the other would threaten the lives of this linguistic group or another in the country. Political parties have stolen the Pakistani state’s right to represent all citizens and instead have appointed themselves as sole representatives of entire linguistic groups [I won’t say ‘ethnic’ groups because it is absurd to talk about this imaginary division that no longer exists in the strict sense of the word but has been exploited by political parties for political gain]. The height of tragedy is that today some parties consider it legitimate to kill innocent Pakistani citizens based on their supposed linguistic affiliation to settle scores with another party that claims to represent them. Democracy cannot remain an excuse for these gigantic failures. And criticizing them should not be interpreted as an invitation to the military to stage a coup. We’ve experimented with a British-inspired political system after our Independence in 1947. We’ve experimented with an American-inspired political setup since 2007. It is time we introduced a Pakistani political system suited to us. And all options are fair if the job can be delivered. The writer works for Geo television. Email: aq@ahmedquraishi.com