Delusions affect and, they affect, on vehemently large scale, if the topman’s head nestles them. Our prime minister has chosen, finally to live with sanguine mirages and he is likely to continue this till
the rest of his premiership. Hola! Good for the country and good for the people. It is nothing strange that whole battalions of make-believers have been pushed into service to construct a grandiose which is partly metaphysical, partly moral and partly humanistic. Our knight-errant is firmly saddled on Rocinante, the horse, with his wings of imagination stretched far and wide; on one side is perched the muse of Iqbal and on the other Ertughral.
It seems his heart bleeds ‘green’ over the sights of persecutions and injustices in the country. His pains are of a lone man who can only rend and writhe, for he is a man on a mission which is now failing. It is not failing since he failed, it is failing because he had a fall from Rocinante, his horse. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”. Our prime minister is absolved of all the responsibility, thus; yet the sally is failing.
So much for the good man. Let’s now see the reality facing us eye-ball-to-eye-ball. Our rot as a society has redounded with epic proportions; sans government, I say. If you read against the design, a queer social engineering, though not new, is being done at roaring speed.
A new tik tok cult of morality has emerged exercising outreach through palm-tops. Images of close-to-heart celebrities practicing moral sciences are being bombarded on the public, seeping right into their sub-conscious. The vanguard of this array is “Sajjada Nasheens”, religious celebrities, sports stars and all those who command public imagination.
The fallacy of ad populum is being practiced to shift the glances from real problems. It is a new make-believe world occupied by the images of moral philanthropes. This engineering (deliberate de-generation, indeed) is going to cost us more than it exacted, in form of terrorism, from our social being. This new opiate is the master-narrative of our progeny.
It is really interesting to see acclaimed spiritual practitioners slipping into peals of ecstasy as if preaching by example. They are claimants of large share in the elitist spectrum of this country. They thrive on social connections with high ups which strengthens their prestige multi-fold. Time to time we see their images, on social media, with powerful personages of the country. They have following in millions; the devotees with the promises of “Promised Land”, Pakistan.
This spiritual elite not only commands respect but it has serious money at its disposal also. They live in comfort, wear imported brands and have quite a many yearly foreign trips to their credit. Thanks to the west which sponsors them now in a bid to insulate its expatriate population against the ideology of political Islam and universal jihad. They have a purpose, heaven-sent or not, home and abroad both.
Behind this heavy screen of delusion lies incompetent and corrupt government machinery. What is the index of public delivery in Pakistan, we can fairly imagine? The failure, or near failure of this state is owing to the failure of civil institutions, it is said.
In classification all civil is that is not military. However, the bureaucracy of Pakistan has a unique consciousness of its own which is principally in conflict to the idea of being the extension of democratic institutions. It is high-handed, over-privileged and delusional.
We don’t need to go far. The mismanagement in case of COVID-19 speaks volumes of the rent-seeking attitude of our government machinery. Yet go to Twitter and you will see the images dapper public servants in designer wear suits and costly N-95 masks serving the public. Even young public servants with initial years in service have turned into local social media personalities. Another kind of delusion has gripped on this side of the fence with another kind of ad populum at play.
Our state is suffering from a two-dimensional cancer: inside and outside. The innards of our state are being eaten out by this corrupt public machinery. In theory, it is the failure of our political institutions. As a class our politicians have failed to deliver.
And as the saying goes, when the cat is away the mice play. The play is on. Interestingly, the chunks of power, legitimate that was, are being nibbled away by larger-than-life-institutions, rent-seeking bureaucracy, elites both home and abroad and these tik-tok social agents who have range of their own.
In all this the political class is missing. And they are highly unlikely to survive in the times to come; an endangered species soon going to be extinct. Democracy, that never was, has flown away already.
And for our prime minister the quote of Ben Johnson may suffice, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.
- Amidst Delusions and Don Quixote - 16/06/2020
