Winning the Hearts and Minds of Pakistanis
By Ahmed Quraishi Pakistan Link | Date not given http://www.pakistanlink.com/Letters/2004/Feb04/13/04.html Drinking, clandestine extramarital relations, and a defeatist mindset - you must have one of the three features, or all of them, to be a real `liberal' in Pakistan. The first two are personal choices that could be overlooked. But the third is slowly becoming a phenomenon that merits special attention. Thanks to a lousy PR performance by an otherwise strong government in Islamabad, a vocal defeatist minority in Pakistan's politics and media turned the government's deft diplomatic handling of issues such as Kashmir and nuclear proliferation into a green light to advocate complete national surrender. Pakistan's able leadership shows sleight of hand in dealing with complex questions, extracting an Indian acknowledgement of Kashmir's disputed status and courageously confronting an international pressure that flustered countries like Iran and Libya. Somewhere along the way, the Pakistani president even manages to put at the top of the international media's agenda the role of European individuals and companies in underworld nuclear proliferation. So how does Pakistan's pseudo liberal minority react? They shower the Pakistani nation with statements, articles and seminars advocating complete national surrender. One of them theorized that Pakistan should even become a passive regional non-player, preferably turn into a second Maldives, Nepal or Sri Lanka, or better still merge into India as a docile province. These defeatists tried to project their own low self-esteem and defeatism onto our nation. Our pseudo liberals are nothing but a blunt example of social development gone wrong, nothing remotely comparable to European and American liberalism honed through centuries of political reformation. The Pakistani pseudo-liberal movement - if it's a movement at all - consists mostly of an elitist social fringe detached from the rest of the nation and whose favorite pastime is jeering at its own country. This last trait is what really should concern us here, the defeatist mindset that not only scorns at anything Pakistani but also is contemptuous of Pakistani nationalism and of all symbols of this nation's pride, independence, and power. This state of mind manifests itself in the case of the Pakistani journalist who willfully joined two French reporters in a premeditated agenda of showing the world that Pakistan was lying about its commitments in the war on terrorism. President Musharraf has aptly described him recently as "a most unpatriotic man" who "doesn't deserve any sympathy whatsoever." Another example is Pakistani parliamentarians who traveled to India recently to attend an anti-globalization meeting. Some of them began criticizing Pakistan no sooner than they set foot in that country. They were not criticizing Islamabad's trade policies but swiping at Pakistan with statements calculated to play in favor of New Delhi in the context of the longstanding Pak-Indian geostrategic rivalry. A Pakistani senator went to the extent of telling the American Associated Press news agency correspondent in Mumbai that Pakistan's Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea was a covert Chinese military base aimed at the US and India. It is not clear what the said senator was trying to do. But what's clear is that he belonged to a `liberal'-oriented political party. The Pakistani type. The `Defeatist Brigade' This lack of national pride prevalent in large portions of our intelligentsia has other manifestations. Recently, when Pakistan's leadership took steps to get India into accepting negotiations on Kashmir, the defeatist segments of our intelligentsia sprang up to celebrate what they perceived to be a Pakistani weakening. Ordinary Pakistanis were shocked to see the pseudo liberals come out of their closets to advocate complete Pakistani social, political and economic surrender before our eastern neighbor. The Pakistani leadership didn't have this in mind when it talked about honorable peace. The defeatists acted on a wrong cue. And what a show they put! An example: Our intelligentsia's `defeatist brigade' was near unanimous on peddling a statement it used with minor variation, to the effect that "Pakistan shares with India the same culture, the same language, the same ethnicity." Pakistan should have no problem in kowtowing the Indian line, so went the argument, which, just for the record, is incorrect in its entirety. But that's an issue for another time. Everyone in Pakistan wants peace and normal relations with India once all disputes are honorably resolved. Pakistan has a big regional role to play and we need peace to do that. But there's a big difference between peace among equals and turning Pakistan into an Indian satellite state. Pakistan's national security does not sell with our intelligentsia's pseudo liberals. They don't see India's mass weaponization drive and well-documented grand visions of regional hegemony. Just listen to their choice of words when one of them talks about our country's future. They invariably begin or end with, "Pakistan has no choice but to �". In their perpetually inferiority-complexed minds, we don't have any choices and must commit a collective suicide. A good test for our defeatists was the proposition floated by the Indian premier in Islamabad in early January on a joint celebration with India of the 1857 War of Independence against the British colonizers. It's a test that our liberals flunked. There's no doubt that Mr. Vajpayee is a proud Indian nationalist. If he seeks his country's preeminence, he's entitled to it, and he should; and if that joint celebration could imply a Pakistani homecoming under the Indian umbrella, then the better. From the Indian viewpoint, nothing can beat the thrill of renaming the Arabian Sea as the Hindu Maha Sagar. But none of the converts to `Indianism' within our estranged pseudo liberal class would have this thought: That our interpretation of 1857 is different than any potential Indian interpretation of the event. In that year, we in Pakistan formally lost the Muslim Mughal Empire of whom Pakistan is the legitimate inheritor. We mourn the formal fall of the Muslim rule over India in that year. I don't think the Indians join us in that interpretation. If anything, 1857 for the Indians marks the year the British freed the Indians from the shackles of a millennium of outsider Muslim rule and paved the way for the native Indians to be empowered for the first time in centuries. A unified India under a single command emerged for the first time thanks to everything the British did, culminating in the 1857 ruthless elimination of the family of the last Mughal ruler. Nationalist Education Optimists, overcoming seemingly impossible hurdles at every turn, built this country. If today's cynics had their way back in 1947, we wouldn't be standing today as a strong nation capable of staring down an adversary five times larger the way we did with India throughout 2002. Islamabad needs to take this country back from the clutches of the small class of defeatists and pessimists who suffocate our media and politics. President Musharraf, Premier Jamali and government spokesman Sheikh Rashid Ahmed have been giving a relative morale boost to the nation through their statements on varied issues, from India to the nuclear proliferation controversy. It was good to hear them stressing national pride. But the problem is, they reacted after the damage was done in the court of public opinion. A defeatist minority eager to wave the white flags after misconstruing peace overtures for surrender hijacked that court. Also, the State must nurture a strong sense of Pakistani nationalism through media and education. School textbooks on Pakistan's history must be revised. Let's forget the repeated notion that Pakistan was created for India's Muslims. That was a rationale suitable for the independence movement. It is irrelevant now and is easily questioned by every ill intentioned Tom, Ranjeet, and Harry dreaming of a united, Indian-dominated South Asia where Pakistan doesn't exist. Most importantly, that rationale is historically incorrect and shortsighted. Pakistan's history goes back a millennium in time, and not just back to 1947. It's an illustrious history that links us to vast regions of Central Asia and the Middle East, blends us together as descendants of martial races, and shows us as the inheritors of the Mughal dynasty, one of the three great non-Arab Muslim dynasties of the region, along with the Ottomans and the Safavids. As Pakistan moves ahead in the world, this comprehensive version of our history can provide a stronger sense of national belonging. It should be attractively integrated into our schoolbooks and made mandatory reading for all Pakistani students in public and private educational institutions in the country. The pervasive sense of low national esteem is directly linked to weak nationalist indoctrination by the State through schools and the media. This has affected us in unimaginable ways. Take our film industry and the pop music industry as two good examples. The Pakistani film industry remains a deformed and an unrepresentative product despite more than fifty years of experience. Technical problems aside, it failed because, from the outset, it tried to ape the film industry of another country: India. Our moviemakers didn't set their sights higher because, quite simply, they were a bunch of low self-esteemed copycats with an inferiority complex. The Pakistani film industry's deformity is magnified by the fact that Iran's motion picture industry, under a religious government, made international breakthroughs, something that eludes our filmmakers despite living in a far more open country. The Pakistani pop music industry, on the other hand, clenched the Pakistani market and reached an international audience in just one decade. It did it because it believed in the power within. It worked from the inherent Pakistani spirit. Its music reflected the nation's culture and Pakistani social subtleties and nuances. Imran Hafeez, an Islamabad-based reader of this outlet, says that a group of Pakistan Government officials, including a relative of Mr. Hafeez, went recently to Moscow on an official business, seizing a moment of improved relations with Russia. "During a sideline discussion over tea," Mr. Hafeez writes to me in an email, "a Pakistani official asked his Russian colleague, `Who is the world superpower now?' "Pakistan," answered the Russian, smilingly. "You see, America could not break Russia for decades. Pakistan did it in a matter of ten years." It's just a question of angles. There's always something positive about a half-empty water glass. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? 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