The myth of tomorrow

Hands folded before him, eyes darkened with age, hair neatly slicked back, Iskandar Mirza seemed perfectly at ease speaking into the microphone that morning.

Having dissolved the assemblies at midnight, he now told the people that such a thing was for their own good. The constitution simply wasn’t “suited to the genius of the nation”. Three weeks later, Ayub determined Mirza’s genius wasn’t suited to the office of the Presidency.

With Ayub came Basic Democracy. A parliamentary system, Ayub said, “required a cool and phlegmatic temperament”, found only in “people living in cold climates.” We were too lacking in “spirit and integrity” to shoulder the burdens of such a system. By the time Ayub slinked away, rent-seeking cartels had raised their heads, wealth pooled in the hands of the few, martial law had chewed through the seams of the federation, and victory was stolen from Fatima Jinnah. Had she won, perhaps her brother’s grand work would not have been torn asunder.

When Musharraf abrogated the constitution, he assured us it was simply “another path to democracy”. The choice before him, in the late general’s words, was “between saving the body at the cost of losing a limb or saving the limb and losing the body”. Imposing martial law, then, was merely another form of surgical amputation, necessary to nurse the nation back to health. In return for substituting his will for the people’s, Musharraf promised good governance and accountability, honour and dignity.

Democracy did indeed return, but by then the nation was aflame with militancy, our own had been sold to American intelligence, the king’s men had robbed the country blind, and Pakistan’s brightest daughter had embraced God.

Would that the generals were alone in such thinking. They are not, as our politicians showcase today. When dissent opens its mouth and refuses to bite at the carrot, the stick comes out in all its violent glory. Each time, the same old argument is trotted out to justify the strangling of liberty. The people want simple things – sanitation and security, electricity and education, paved roads and trains that run on time. The poor man, we are told, wants to chew on such meaty things. He has neither time nor desire for the rich broth of democracy, liberty and justice.

Such things are irritants to be swatted away in the pursuit of progress. Is democracy truly so important when the poor man dies in droves in the summer, and again when the winter wind bites into his bones? Should we not, temporarily, sacrifice loyalty to liberty so the state may guarantee the well-being of the weakest of our nation? Does freedom of speech and an independent judiciary not become a hindrance to a noble, ‘enlightened’ executive? After all, order cannot be brought out of chaos through freedom alone – the state must be empowered in absolute form to battle the enemies of the nation.

Consider. If it were truly this or that, the state’s denuding of the citizen’s fundamental rights would have allowed them to create a prosperous Pakistan by now. Instead, twenty-six million children remain out of school, the poorest of us are seventeen times more vulnerable to sickness than the richest, a third of the nation toils away in poverty, and two provinces burn in the fires of extremism. The appeal of this false binary, dismissed as easily as it is brought forth, is born of a body politic that has yet to come to terms with the instruments it has chosen to exercise power through.

We have borrowed the democratic structures of the West, their parliaments, their constitutions, and their institutions. But in doing so, we have ignored the history of their conception. Civil liberties – the right to speak freely, to organize and protest, to due process – preceded the guarantees of education, health, and livelihood that the state promises to uphold. These liberties were not the consequence of a well-functioning state but the foundation upon which the edifice of modern governance was built.

Freedom of speech, perhaps the most fundamental of such liberties, is dismissed as a frivolous virtue, a miserly creature only to be adopted only when the nation becomes civilized. Through the lens of such thinking, speech is defanged of its lofty functions – to right wrongs, to hold power accountable, to herald innovation and to beat stagnation.

With the Industrial Revolution came factories swollen with heat and sweat. Paid a pittance, forced to sleep in cramped, putrid quarters, it was children as young as five – toiling away for sixteen hours a day – that manned the workstations. Dickens, writing in 1837, said of the factory owner’s perverseness, “[they believed] all poor people should have the alternative – for they would compel nobody, not they – of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.”

Neither base compassion nor concern for the vulnerable compelled parliament to investigate the lived nightmare of child labour or the horrors of the factory. It was a free press and a free citizenry that documented, reported, and exposed the rot festering at the heart of the empire. It was free speech, that most frivolous of virtues, that made parliament confront its failings.

But the state understands this, and therefore fears it. When called to atone for their sins against liberty, they summon up the spectre of instability. It is not the common man’s speech we fear, they say, but the demagogue’s, the separatist’s, the extremist’s.

But then, it is not them we demand such freedoms for, but for parties that have fallen out of favour. They, naturally, do not consider the speech of the fallen overly dissimilar to the former three, because demands for change seem as antithetical to their existence as militancy. The key difference, of course, is that the Praetorian brings all his immense power to bear on the offending party, whereas the hate-mongers are forgiven, washed clean, and protected so long as they are useful.

Did separatism or demagoguery – or even the Praetorian’s opponent as of late – flow from the font of civil liberty? Or was it the suppression of civil liberty, the co-opting of elected representatives for short-term gain, and the silencing of voices critical to their camp followers, that brought forth such ills?

The Praetorian claims that his opponent is a herald of anarchy dressed in the garments of liberty. Let us, for a moment, take the Praetorian’s words at face value and accept that his opponent is the way he describes.

In silencing dissent now, the Praetorian commits to the same course of action that brought the anarchist forth in the first place. Had speech critical to him not been silenced then; would the anarchist’s falsehoods not have been exposed when they collided with the truth? Would his conduct not have been denounced openly? Would his opponents not have contended with him on equal grounds and put a stopper to his ascent?

But then, for the Praetorian to imagine that today’s chaos could have been avoided, he must first put to rest his conception of liberty as a frivolous accessory to society, costing much and giving little in return. He must begin to see it as a civilized nation does; a sieve for the collective wisdom of the people, through which ideas are exchanged, beliefs challenged, falsehoods shunned, truth celebrated, and innovation brought forth.

In this form, liberty may no longer haunt his mind, and can instead be embraced as the instrument of creative destruction, whereby the old and dysfunctional are discarded for the sake of new growth and progress. Freedom of speech, then, is not chaos, but a vehicle for necessary disruption, allowing society to wrestle with itself, and through the immense churning of ideas and thought, correct its course.

Alas. Today, they say, we must stomach the yoke of tyranny. Tomorrow, we may enjoy the fruits of liberty. But today has lasted seventy-seven years, and tomorrow may never come.

The writer is a student of law at King’s College London. He can be reached at: salar.rashid@kcl.ac.uk