Pervasive immorality, the central component of which is absence of integrity, will bring down social order. And when there is no order left, society will melt into chaos. And at that point it will cease to be society. It will become an unregulated mass of chaos and anarchy.
Morality, at the level of society, is not goodness which helps us to sneak into heaven. It is the essential self-discipline, a system of self-regulation, which makes the journey from here to the hereafter, both of society and of the individuals who compose it, much more manageable, and more easily negotiable. It is an infrastructure of behavioral assumptions, a set of ” dos and don’ts” voluntarily self- imposed which does not require a police force to ensure its enforcement.
If this were to be imposed by law, it would need one policeman per individual, to do so. And in our case, it would need another policeman to scrutinize the first one, and so on. And that would make for plenty of policemen.
Without truth there can be no morality. And without the ability of one to speak or first admit truth to oneself, truth itself cannot take hold.
But when truth abdicates and goes into hiding, the lie takes its place. But the lie being abstract cannot be easily spotted and proved. Its very “invisibility” therefore does not allow the lie to become the vanguard of immorality in society. But theft, for which the lie becomes the essential support and protection, is not an abstract act. Therefore, more often than not, theft can be “seen” and more easily proved. Theft can therefore become the flag bearer of immorality in society.
But when the army of lies which comes out in support of theft becomes too numerous, theft finds exoneration because it becomes all but impossible to prove. And when not proved, it is considered not to have taken place. At this point society can be considered to have gone to total rot.
Thus comes about a strange and tragic paradox in countries and societies built upon a “moral” infrastructure of theft supported by lies. Officially there exists in them no theft by virtue of its becoming too commonplace and acceptable. And truth, which can identify the malaise, before the treatment of this malaise can hope to begin, already lies subverted and displaced by fabrication and the lie.
And so, between a self-reinforcing mechanism of theft, and the lies supporting it, a prostrate society finds itself in throes of death without any hope of cure.
And here lies the essential and existential problem of the Pakistan of today. Morality, at the broader social level, is defined by the rule of law. Whether such rule of law exists or is absent, is easily determined by the immunity which theft enjoys in society. In our case every person who constitutes society, including the leading thieves themselves, can and does identify the core disease afflicting society in the form of unrestrained theft. But “officially” this disease remains unidentified and untreated because “legally” the means to identify and treat it have been corrupted into redundancy.
The extent of this redundancy can best be gauged by scrutinizing the conduct of some of the judges of the Supreme Court, the highest sanctum of law in the country.
Three of these judges have attained immortality for standing by the cause of theft:
- Qazi Faez Isa leads this pack. Being catapulted into the ranks of the higher judiciary by a man like Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhary should have been disqualification enough. But he went further and blocked the logical and legal conclusion of the Hudaibya Paper Mills case by killing it. This was the only open and shut case of mega corruption in Pakistan. It had been decisively proven. And then nullified.
- Athar Minallah also holds a perch of pride in this pantheon of inequity. He opened an unprecedented path for a criminal to break out of jail and flee the country. But it is the logic employed by him to justify such action i.e demanding of the authorities that they give a guarantee that Nawaz Sharif would not die unless he was allowed to go abroad for medical treatment, that marks him out as a scoundrel apart. Would he have asked for a similar guarantee on behalf of someone not so loaded with stolen wealth? And since committing this unforgiveable crime, he has tried to carve out a reputation for being a judge who was known to uphold human rights. For him to entertain an expectation, that such a reputation would provide adequate cover to him for standing by thieves, he must surely be relying on the stupidity of 220 million people.
- And Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhel is the latest to have crawled his way into this fraternity of immortality for the deeply flawed. He has just suggested that the constitutional question regarding the holding of elections be submitted to the same parliament for resolution, which has just recently made a theft of less than fifty crore rupees, a crime non-cognizable by NAB! And if this was not enough, his confidential note raising objections to an action by a couple of judges on the same bench, which should have gone to the Chief Justice, by some miracle missed the Chief Justice but reached the counsel for the thugs instead. This should mark him out as a master of the sleight of hand…a magician extraordinaire! This exposure, creating controversy, resulted from villainy on the part of Mr Mandokhel and incompetence on the part of Farooq H. Naik, who was better suited to getting bails for the likes of Ayyan Ali etc than arguing weighty constitutional issues in the Supreme Court.
These are just three of fifteen judges [and there must be more] who constitute the Supreme Court. For the highest judicial body of the land this is a frightening percentage. And what makes it even more so is the sheer brazenness with which these three have paid tribute at the altar of theft.
Each one of us, whether we have the power to influence events or not, must at least retain total clarity on the battle being waged in Pakistan today. This is a battle for thieves and to sanctify their right to theft. NOTHING ELSE. And ironically, those fighting it on behalf of the thugs are mostly those who are bound by a sacred oath to stand behind and for the state!
This battle between upholding the right of a few to commit theft, and the many who have for years been despoiled by the exercise of this right, is a battle which can conceivably bring down the state itself.
And to think that if the founder of Pakistan was to be defined by one word, that word would have been “integrity”!