Changing of the guard
By Mohsin Hamid
I had an odd experience at the Lahore airport as I was headed back to New York last summer. I remember waiting in a queue that would not move because travellers with official escorts kept bypassing us and proceeding straight to the check-in counters. In the end, a couple of my fellow passengers made such a fuss, which I and others supported by placing our luggage trolleys in the aisles so as to block access, that some semblance of the basic principle of first-come, first-serve was restored and we managed to receive our boarding passes before all seats on the overbooked flight disappeared.
It was flushed with the pride of this minor civic victory that I arrived at the passport desk. The immigration agent subjected my documents to the half-hooded gaze typical of a minor bureaucrat savouring his power and was about to send me on my way when something strange happened: a voice descended from the raised seat behind him and a hand reached forward.
The army had intervened. A young officer, clean-cut and extremely polite, was now examining my papers. "Are you the one who wrote the novel?" he asked me.
It occurred to me that this man probably administered the Exit Control List. Some higher-up with no democratic authority may have decided that I was a threat to national security, a slightly nutty but rather unsavoury novelist with crackpot ideas. If I, with my weak stomach and susceptibility to the flu, were hauled off to some dank dungeon for interrogation, I might not survive.
"I'm one of the ones," I managed to say, with a panicked helplessness similar to what a writer feels when his work is in the hands of a great literary critic, "who have written a novel."
"No need to be alarmed," he said with a friendly smile. "I just wanted to meet you to say: keep it up. We need more Pakistanis writing novels. I hope to read yours soon." With a nod he sent me on my way. It was a rather pleasant brush with military authority, I must admit. But I was struck by the fact that he and I were both in our late twenties. Not long ago, we could only have imagined an encounter like this between an army officer and a writer. Now, we were old enough to live it.
When my Dada passed away recently, my family's link to those born and raised in British India, those who established our country, passed with him. My parents' generation, the children of a still-young Pakistan, including Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto, and Pervez Musharraf, is well into middle-age. They sit atop our ministries and behind the counters of our most profitable paan shops, but as they look around them they see a nation utterly unlike the land of optimism that is the setting for the stories they tell of their youth.
Meanwhile, a new generation is coming of age. In 2001, those of us like myself who were born in the year our country was first torn apart, the year of the Bangladesh war, will turn 30 years old. We are no longer children. Some of us are junior bank vice presidents now, army captains, associate professors of anthropology. Some of us have recently become grandparents. Some of us have died of heroin overdoses (the backwash of the Afghan wars), or in the bombings of bus depots that may be part of the price our society pays for having a hostile neighbour.
We are a generation of people who, in many cases, find ourselves looking forward to lives less secure and less prosperous than those of our parents. Fortunately, we are beginning to have the power to do something about this. My suggestion is we start by abandoning the platitudes which may have sounded reasonable when cold-war cash propped up our economy but are increasingly ridiculous today.
We are told that our interests are better served by conflict than by peace on all our boundaries. This is nonsense. We are not, despite our nuclear weaponry, a beacon to the world's Muslims, a source of support to them in times of difficulty. How have we really helped the Palestinians, the Chechens, the Bosnians in their struggles? How have we helped the Indonesians in their current financial crisis? Even more troubling, how do we help the Muslims of western China? Despite our words, we do little.
Egypt can boast of Al-Azhar, Iran of an evolving, indigenously generated Islamic democracy, and Malaysia of an economy strong enough to stand up to the more temperamental flows of global capital. What is our contribution? The Muslim world does not need a sword-arm kept on life support by international lenders. We need fingers that can navigate a keyboard. We need universities that unlock the potential of our people. We need to part with the false pride of ill-equipped, economically unsustainable militarism and actually take steps to empower ourselves.
The basic role of a state is to provide a decent living for its people. Full stop. Pakistan is struggling to do this, and yet we remain caught up in games of geopolitics and false delusions. We have limited resources. We need to cap, and slowly reduce, our spending on defence. We need to open our borders to trade on all sides: access to nearby markets will provide the economic opportunities every young graduate knows we lack today. We need to take steps to bridge the divisions between our provinces and classes and religious groups by showing that the benefits of remaining within a prosperous Pakistan and abiding by its laws far outweigh those of any other cause for which one might pick up a gun.
As a boy who grew up in Lahore in a house about as far from the Wagah border as the range of a field howitzer, who dreamed as all my friends did of flying an F-16 or undergoing training to become a commando, I say with respect that the army has no business running our country. I trust our armed forces to protect our borders in the face of an invasion, to act selflessly and courageously. But I do not believe that generals will give us what we need most.
We need peace. Make no mistake: Pakistan is struggling today because we are at war. Perhaps not openly, but one has only to look at the border between Germany and France to understand the difference between our official peace and the real thing. Despite the designs of our neighbours, despite our smaller size, we must find our way out of conflicts we will not win. And I suspect that a new generation, people who have tried to look for a job recently or who have left the country because of the difficulties they faced in doing so, may be better equipped to lead a peacetime Pakistan, something we have not yet known in our fifty-three years of history.
My outlook for 2001 is a slow return to the negotiating table. A reduction of hostilities. A gradual revival of the economy. A tapping of the vast pool of talent represented by overseas Pakistanis.
If this does not happen, we should elect a government committed to making it happen. Regardless, the generation that is now thirty will one day be fifty. A changing of the guard will come. It will be our turn to run the ministries and the paan-shops.
But why wait?
(From: Dawn) |