analysis: Fatal illusions —Salman Tarik Kureshi

Conformity was imposed on the pluralism prized by Jinnah and a unitary state, belying his crusades for provincial autonomy, was created. In place of our rich and diverse heritage, cultural uniformity was imposed. Ideological formulations were trumpeted, dissent discouraged

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned” — Antonio Gramsci.

In the smokescreen of secondary
issues and non-issues with which we are daily blanketed by the media, it is easy to lose sight of the central importance of the counter-insurgency campaigns being waged to save the citizens and the state of Pakistan, and the simultaneous political processes under way for the establishment of democratic, federal rule in the country. These are the most fundamental and critically urgent issues of our national history. For, whether destruction of the insurgency or construction of a political system, failure along either axis can lead to the disintegration into savage anarchy of our state and society.

Today’s brief essay is about delusions, the kinds that drive individuals and nations to folly. As any psychiatrist will tell you, delusions and the delusionary behaviour patterns they engender are precisely what we mean when we talk about pathological psychoses.

In Buddhist mythology, Gautama Buddha was assailed by the demon Mara when meditating under the sacred Bo tree. Mara appeared in the form of a gigantic ruler, mounted on an elephant 150 leagues high. The demon sprouted 1,000 arms, each of which brandished a deadly weapon. The point of the story is that this immense demon Mara was in fact Gautama’s own shadow self, an emanation of his mind, whose name meant ‘Delusion’. And it was necessary for Gautama to confront the immensity of his own delusions before he could see through them to the truth and become the Buddha. Truly, the delusions born from our fantasies and unfulfilled desires are colossal, bigger than ourselves, and capable of consuming us entirely.

Such a set of deadly delusions exists in the Pakistani political psyche. I ask my readers to connect four specific newspaper images to identify the connecting link between the different persons pictured there. The most recent is that of Maulana (how was this honorific earned?) Fazlullah. This young man from a village in Malakand became transformed into such a monster of violence and savage cruelty that the world is celebrating the news of his being probably put down like a rabid animal.

Hailing from the same province, but from an utterly different milieu — economically, socially and educationally — is a mild-looking 30-year-old former business executive from Connecticut. No two people could be more different than the socially severely disadvantaged Fazlullah and the American-educated son of an Air Vice-Marshall, Faisal Shahzad. But, it seems, the same kinds of compulsions drove both the former warlord of Swat and the ‘Idiot Bomber’ of Times Square.

Look now at the picture of a young man from a Punjabi village. Ajmal Kasab’s plain, fully shaven face is an ordinary one that could have been seen on a million young men. But (and this is what really disturbs) there is a grin on his lips as if he were in a transport of orgasmic delight as he fires his automatic weapon. Observe the frightful grin of a fiend, a ghoul, a blood-lusting monster, on the face of an ordinary-seeming young man!

An image from eight years ago, which I have previously described in these pages, is next. This is of an aging Mohajir father beside the body of his son, killed in Afghanistan and returned dead to Karachi. The face of the old man could have been expected to be a face of rage, or of grief, or even of sad resignation. But, no, this face is expressionless, the eyes tearless. His son is a shaheed (martyr), he says, and should not be mourned. He will now send his remaining sons, one after the other, to their respective trysts with martyrdom. Now, one can accept that the father could believe sufficiently in a cause to be consoled for his son’s death. But it is hard to accept that he could eagerly will a similar destiny on his other sons. More, that this bereaved father is unmoved to any word, sign or expression of grief, is beyond understanding. Grief for the dead is normal. Even animals show it. In psychiatric terms, this Karachi father’s lack of sorrow, his ‘absence of affective response’, is pathological.

And that is precisely my point. The set of delusions connecting these four ethnically, educationally and socially far apart persons is just that: pathological.

To trace the beginnings of this national psychosis, one goes back to Hamza Alavi’s concept of ‘the over-developed state’, the well trained and organised civil and military institutions created by British rule in the subcontinent. In Pakistan, political parties, peopled in the main by representatives of the rural elite or by populist spell-binders of dubious intellectual depth, failed to gain control over these, the real wielders of power. The civil-military oligarchy assumed an autonomous role, independent of the interests of the dominant classes, resulting in a dichotomy between a weak ‘democratic’ political culture and a stronger ‘administrative’ political culture.

It is this latter group, comprising the bureaucrats, officers and professionals of the Pakistani power elite, which proceeded to contrive a post facto national narrative for the country. Jinnah’s liberal, inclusive vision was converted into a faux Islamic exclusivism. Conformity was imposed on the pluralism prized by Jinnah and a unitary state, belying his crusades for provincial autonomy, was created. In place of our rich and diverse heritage, cultural uniformity was imposed. Ideological formulations were trumpeted, dissent discouraged.

Antonio Gramsci, who witnessed the rise of the fascists in his native Italy, identified two quite distinct forms of political control: domination, which referred to direct physical coercion by the police and armed forces, and hegemony, which referred to ideological control and, more crucially, consent. By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations.

Such a hegemonic narrative was thrust onto Pakistan. It multiplied greatly in strength on July 5, 1977, when the usurper of the day snarled over the media about what he called ‘an Islamic system’. The institutions he promoted and the retrograde educational systems he erected have polluted the intellectual atmosphere of the land and given birth to today’s bigoted, obscurantist political culture and its poisonous fallouts of violent insurgency, terrorism and cold-blooded mass murder.

Today, the spurious ‘national ideology’ promoted by the establishment to maintain an unconstitutional control, has spun out of control. As a result, both the citizens and the state remain in mortal peril.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet