When I was working for Pakistan Television, a colleague, who was a senior cameraman, narrated an anecdote over a cup of tea regarding PTV’s administrative affairs: “Some years back an international one-day cricket match was to be played in Peshawar. For its live coverage an OB Van (outside/ outdoor broadcast van) was requisitioned from PTV Centre, Lahore. I was camera incharge. We reached Peshawar Centre and had a meeting with the general and the administrative managers regarding the security arrangement. Admin manager said: “I assure you nothing untoward will happen”. I insisted that there should be foolproof security arrangement for the van and for our personal vehicles. He assured us that security would be tight. Next day when we set up the recording equipment, the stadium was already chock-a-block. As the match started a big unruly crowd tried to gatecrash. A local member of the crew told me that tribesmen of cricketer Shahid Afridi had gathered and wanted to enter the stadium without tickets. They argued with the security staff that they had the right to watch the match for free as the cricketer boy was from their Afridi tribe. In the meantime, Shahid Afridi came to bat and got out in no time. There was a hullabaloo. Security deployed at the gate pushed the highly-charged mob back which turned violent because they had failed to see their boy in action. It started pelting the parked vehicles with stones. When we came out at the end of the match I found my car with front and back screens totally smashed. Outraged, we reached the TV centre and had a meeting with the general and admin managers. I protested loudly that why our personal vehicles were not protected as promised. The admin manager, responsible for the arrangement, replied: “It’s not my fault. If Afridi had not got out so soon, nothing would have happened.” “I threw my arms up.”

“If this or that had not happened” is a recurrent pattern of our conversations especially when we talk about our history. Such suppositions spring from our national failure of what we professedly wanted to achieve but failed. It is a product of collective despair. Lack of better future compels us to be obsessed with the past. But the past offers little more than what it has created, a bleak tomorrow. Scared of the things which are ahead and disappointed by what happened in the past pushes us into a state that prompts us to fantasise; we enter the cocoon of alternative reality. It’s a defensive measure that protects us assuaging the pain of failure. With the benefit of hindsight we imagine what other options were available when we made a particular decision in a particular situation. But we pay scant attention to the concrete conditions which forced us to choose what we chose. We are generally more concerned with the consequences of what we chose, not with why we chose what we chose.

M.A. Jinnah, the founder of the state, declared on March 21, 1948 in Dhaka that Urdu alone would be the sole national language of Pakistan and just for once he was booed by Bengalis who were not only at the forefront of Pakistan Movement but also formed the majority population of the new state. They protested and it morphed into a political conflict. We now whisper in hushed tones that if this had not happened the seeds of separation would not have been sown. But we hesitate to analyse the factors that made him to take such a step.

We refuse to understand why Bengalis loved their language so much? We have internalised the imposition of foreign languages such as Urdu and English during the Raj. Bengalis had seen the renaissance of Bengali during the Raj. The first Nobel Laureate from India was a poet of their language. We ignore the fact that M.A. Jinnah who spoke just two languages, Gujrati and English, was so influenced by Muslim leaders of Uttar Pradesh that he made their language the national language of Pakistan. What an irony! He couldn’t speak Urdu, his national language. ‘If he had not done this’ is now our refrain.

In 1958, General Ayub Khan supported by his fellow generals and civil bureaucrats mostly imported from India imposed martial law and put the politicians in jail or debarred them from politics. He stalled the process of nascent democracy and created the One Unit lumping all the diverse regions of West Pakistan together that provoked an angry response from the regions forced to form it except Punjab. They were diverse regions having distinct histories, languages and identities. The effort was designed to sacrifice the richness of diversity, taken as dangerous poverty, at the altar of ill-conceived notion of monolithic national identity. Combined with it was a ludicrous notion of parity between the One Unit (West Pakistan) and Bengal (East Pakistan): both were declared equal defying the fact that latter had majority of population.

The 1951 census shows that the West Pakistan had population of 33.7 million while the East Pakistan had population of around 42 million. So 33.7 million people were equal to 42 million people. The more was the less and vice versa. It had direct impact on legislative powers, distribution of national resources, administrative services and government jobs. To understand why we faced this fraught situation we mustn’t forget that at the time of the Partition, Pakistan received only 17.5 per cent of British India’s assets and liabilities. But in terms of military resources, it got 36pc and India got 64pc. I repeat; 17.5pc assets and 36pc military resources. It resulted in the civil-military imbalance which led to the 1971 debacle.

Again we pine for what we lost. If General Yahya’s coterie and Z.A. Bhutto supported by Punjabi and Sindhi bigwigs had accepted the results of the 1970 national elections, the country would have remained united. If Bhutto had not launched a military operation after dismissing Balochistan’s democratic government in 1974 centrifugal forces would have no traction with the people. But we feel reluctant to analyse his mental make-up because he was judicially murdered. If Akbar Bugti of Balochistan was not killed by dictator Musharraf, we wouldn’t have the current unrest in the province. We repeat the litany of ‘ifs’ or suppositions ad nauseam. Our decisions boomeranged on us because they were driven by the urge for power and vested interests, not by reasoning and fairness. Reasoning and fairness are the way to course correction. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2024