So, what is the state of Pakistan’s dilapidation today? Even a peripheral but honest survey should reveal the following:
- The country stands financially bankrupt, and economically trashed.
- Every national institution is gasping in various stages of decay.
- The moral backbone of the nation has surrendered completely to hypocrisy, mendacity, and greed.
- And the elite, which normally provides leadership to a people, have embraced the ethos of pimps, committed to prostituting the people they lead.
How could this country, born of so many noble aspirations, have fallen on the dung heap of unrelieved depravity so fast?
How could its elite and its army have sold the country out so brazenly in the clear light of day, such that no betrayal in near history can match this treachery except the Quisling sellout of Norway? Could this be due to a malignancy in our DNA nurtured over thousands of years i.e character shortcomings ingrained in us by any or all of the following:
- An unbroken tradition of sellout first recorded in our history when Raja Ambhi of Taxila invited Alexander to India so that they could join forces in order to defeat Raja Porus of Jehlum?
- The transactional aspect of religious practice borrowed from Hinduism, of trudging to the grave of a saint and pledging something of merit or value to the Almighty, in case He granted our prayer for which the pledge was made?
- Confusing an act of worship with that of goodness or charity; and coming away from such worship with the conviction that now, since what was due to God had been duly bestowed on Him, and our duty on to Him discharged, we were therefore free to do our duty to ourselves, prime among which was the filling of our own pockets with wealth which belonged to the state or to some other person?
- Or has the insatiability of our greed been engendered by the insecurity bred over thousands of years of historical tradition where all land in India belonged to the king, and even grants made by him reverted back to him on the death of the beneficiary, leaving his family high and dry; and this king was the heir of the wealth of all his people so that when a person died, his family could inherit nothing, except at the pleasure of the king?
Whatever the combination of forces and experiences which have brought us to our sorry pass, we need to identify a single point of focus from which to begin our turn-around. This single point should be our core malady from which all the others begin. The one that has brought down our entire moral infrastructure without which no society can survive in a state of health i.e that “something” which bars our way out of our hole in which we have languished for centuries and dug deeper into it all the while.
In my view the single point on which all our resources should be focused to bring down and subdue, in every way possible, is theft in our society. Theft, especially major theft [which will have to be defined] should be considered a capital crime–the one offense not acceptable under any circumstances. A beginning needs to be made by giving theft the bad name it deserves as the mother of all our evils.
If we can cleanse our society of theft, the very process involved in eliminating it, will cleanse us of many of our other ailments.
This may seem like a very simple idea. But it may be one thinking deeply over.