Blunders, delusion and egotism

The famous English writer George Orwell in his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four very rightly said, "The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed."

In many developing countries, the common masses are so indoctrinated by the state that they hardly find time to compare their lives with those enjoyed in modern civilized nations. Such states make sure that from the education system to literature and from the news media to the political domain, everything is controlled and the masses are fed propaganda about being superior to others on the basis of religion, ethnicity, and nationality.

Patriotism and religion serve as opium for those societies deprived of critical thinking and the knowledge of modern civilization. This perhaps is the reason that the government led by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), selected to rule by the military establishment, has no clue that gradually the country is reaching a point where the damage done to society, political discourse and the economy will be irreparable.

The Covid-19 pandemic is still out of control and other than making speeches, the government and Prime Minister Imran Khan have done nothing in reality to save the lives of people and the economy. On Thursday, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) announced that its foreign reserves had shrunk to US$9.96 billion, a drop of $146 million in one week. This is in spite of a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last year, a $2.5 billion inflow of cash from China, and hefty loans from Arab Gulf states.

And the Imran Khan regime, as usual, blames the previous governments and simply lies to the people that the drain on the nation's finances has been necessary to repay the loans of the previous governments, while the truth is that every elected government in Pakistan had to repay the loans taken by military dictators or the puppet regimes of the establishment.

Despite that, the previous governments led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) were not only able to repay the loans taken by past regimes but were also able to launch infrastructure development projects and massive poverty-alleviation programs.

Since the PTI regime is another puppet of the establishment, it is not accountable to anyone. Prime Minister Imran Khan in a speech in the National Assembly on Thursday reflected his dictatorial and delusional mindset by first declaring Osama bin Laden a martyr and then by lying bluntly that his idea of opposing the Covid-19 lockdown is now being adopted by the entire world.

Terming bin Laden a martyr reflects the extremist vision of Khan and also his inability to understand that bin Laden while leading al-Qaeda killed more Pakistani civilians and troops than Americans. It perhaps only needed common sense not to categorize bin Laden as a martyr, but then common sense is very uncommon in Pakistan these days, especially in the ranks of the ruling party.

Though Khan's special assistant on political communication, Shahbaz Gill, tried to control the damage by saying that the prime minister had not used the word "martyr" for bin Laden, millions of people had watched the National Assembly speech live, so even the spin masters with the help of the controlled section of the press cannot control the damage.

Now, this of course was not unintentional or a slip of tongue by Khan. Just recently progressive academics and writers like Pervaiz Hoodhboy, Mohammed Hanif and Ammar Ali Jan have been shown the door by the universities where they had been teaching. This seems to be an organized campaign to mold the minds of the people again toward right-wing religious views and to enslave them in the chains of patriotism and the self-interpreted doctrines of religion.

A hybrid regime in Pakistan normally thrives on patriotism and religious doctrines with the help of mullahs and extremist religious outfits. The question is, are not 71 years of Pakistan's political history enough to determine that indoctrinating the minds of successive generations through the educational curriculum with hyper-nationalism and self-interpreted religious doctrines have only brought ignorance and destruction to the country? Isn't it a very simple fact that no direct or indirect military rule can steer the country out of its problems?

If sanity prevailed, the invisible forces should have understood that the likes of Hoodhboy, Hanif and Ammar Ali Jan can produce minds with knowledge and thinking skills that eventually will only help in the betterment of the country. The problem is the establishment does not want masses to think and to compare their liberties and standards of living with the developed nations of the world.

After all, an ignorant society fed the opium of patriotism and self-interpreted religious doctrines by an alliance of the mullahs and the military elite can ensure the rule of the establishment for a longer period. This is the reason a man like Imran Khan, who sadly has no vision and no knowledge of political or even geographical history of the world, has been imposed on the nation as prime minister, while those with genuine leadership ability are facing trials both in the media and in the courts.