The year 2022 marked the death of a dream. Good or bad, right or wrong, the conversation has moved on beyond this. What was a promise from the status quo turned out to be the start of an entrenchment that perhaps will take decades to undo, that too if there is any will.
Starting from Musharraf’s ‘enlightened moderation’ to Imran Khan’s ‘Riyasat e Medina’ to Nawaz Sharif’s ‘Vote Ko Izzat Do’ and beneath the talk of startups, social media democratisation, digital warfare, cultural pockets, modern Pakistani society is anything but modern. Or progressive.
Far too many incidents involving criminal activities of all kinds have taken place to move anyone out of their pretensions but stranger still is the harbouring of the dream of democracy.
Whether the conversations consist of trite comparisons with the US or the longing for what India is (or used to be given how our collective mindset is still very much rooted in the past), there is a bizarre comfort in the idea that if this nation gets to have a say, All Will Be Well.
Undoubtedly, the sustainability of a system is the bedrock of a civilised state that finds its strength in being able to uphold values that enable society to function somewhat in a civil manner consisting of the honouring of collective struggle, freedom of thought and cultural development.
But are we even there? To think that right now Mian Nawaz Sharif is the only element of the dream of sustainability in the form of a sliver of democracy… this is literally the personification of the fragility of any semblance of a system whatever it may be right now.
Pakistan has aged, 76 years may be young for a country but our people are not new. The bitterness that permeates through the people heightened by the last 5 years and the outright ignorance of history fuelled by the rise of digital equality – however limited it may be, the growing impact cannot be denied – hasn’t quite strengthened any collective movement.
While Imran Khan’s rise to power may have felt as the era of a New Order, the values ushered in were anything but democratic. Instead a new language of hostility, eradication of free thought, annihilation of cultural liberation and compromised rule of law was delivered on a silver platter which perhaps belonged to the state treasury but worse crimes have been committed.
On the part of society values which are used for policing – morality, honour, shame – none of which add to the growth of the nation form the basis of rational thought. How then can one even begin to dream of democracy, a process that can only function with rationality at the helm?
But then again, these are precisely the values that uphold the political status quo. Is there a need for anything else then?
Civil society institutions and ideas are good enough to ease existence in today’s Pakistan but to some extent all of it rests on the remnants of an order that was inherited post Partition – modern, progressive, postcolonial, however it may be categorised.
Except the erosion of that order due to the definitive nature of societal values has meant that while one may not relate to them, for every one of us there are several of those for whom those values are a way of living.
One thing is certain – the country has exhausted its supply of progressives. There are none left.
Limited development, the rise of the lost cases of the semi-educated, the educated regressives and anti-social behaviour all contributing to the breakdown between state and society has brought us to this precise moment where there is a desperate need to clutch onto some semblance of democratic sustainability – Nawaz Sharif.
It’s about time we checked ourselves as to what democracy means because right now the situation is far from a dream.