Compatriots not patriots

This is not an article about Imran Khan or the PTI (So, Insafians are requested to disarm all social media weapons ready to fire abusive mail right now, please.). It’s about Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Increasingly, the two seem to be drifting apart. This disconnect is dangerous for democracy and against the spirit of the 18th Amendment. It’s also unjust to the people of KP who wilfully voted in the PTI last year.
Most commentators argue that a year is too early to assess the achievements or flaws of the new provincial governments. However, in view of the criminal lapse of the much-anticipated local bodies elections, we have lost the opportunity to account for how provinces may have benefited under new leadership.
This is not the fault of the KP government. They are the most committed perhaps, and the most prepared for local bodies elections. Instead, the problem lies in the increasing suspicion that KP is a consolation prize for what was essentially a race by Imran Khan for prime ministership.
Why does Imran Khan cringe from being purely provincial and continue to greedily harbour ambitions for centralised power and federal leverage? In many ways, Imran Khan is the epitome of our unresolved identity crisis which prevents us from imbibing the democratic understanding that governance at local, devolved levels is the most effective way to bring national change. Everything else is hype, grandeur and lust for power, not desire to govern or realise citizenry.
Counter to those critics who observe from outside of the province and insist that KP is ‘a mess’ today, visits and discussions with a variety of official and non-governmental actors have yielded different sociological findings. Whether one agrees with their policies or not, the PTI government is perhaps today, the most active and energetic in its commitment to execute policy in the province.
Just three departments in KP (education, health and local government) are fairly successful examples of that elusive partnership that we traditionally moan about – between the bureaucrat and the political representative. The benefit of appointing competent and efficient officials for these critical offices in KP seems to be trickling down to district levels. This, despite a spanner called Fazalur Rehman.
Merit and commitment can be measured by the fact that some district officials in Swat today are those who would go to office every day, in bullet-proof vests and with guns in both hands, despite threats and attacks on their families by the Taliban some years ago. Change can be noted by the fact that women officers are working before office hours and female clerks are also seen to be active and serving their offices with some urgency too.
Sehat ka Insaf (the drive for polio eradication) and the Tameer-e-School Programme as well as other public-private-volunteer campaigns and programmes are catching the imagination of the people and drawing them into the process of citizenship. The right to information is taken seriously in the corridors of government in KP.
For me, simply, the credit for progress and change always goes to the people of communities and some actors who trigger change. However, governance is about enabling this change or, at the very least, not getting in the way. To the extent that corrupt officials siphon off material assistance that can enable that change, it is also worth observing that the PTI is struggling with removing and replacing those it deems to be involved in such malpractice. More important is that this is part of a broader policy of routine monitoring and not just some witch-hunt that is being implemented in the field too.
That’s the good news. Of course this is not enough. All this will be negligible and erased unless the larger issue of security is resolved. Polio cases keep popping up from Fata; girls schools have not been rebuilt; economic empowerment has not shown a pulse; beautification is a silly extravagance when Peshawar is in critical need of clinical cleaning up and, radically upgrading and equipping old hospitals is maybe more important than building new ones.
Even more critical, on the issue of security, Khan seems not to have grasped the people’s call for regaining a pre-Taliban status. It is completely inaccurate to suggest that there is consensus in KP against drones too. Instead, Khan’s confused attempt at reconciliation through appeasement of the militants may be the biggest error of judgement and against the collective wisdom of his own state officials.
Khan’s obsessive concern for ‘national security’ against foreign powers needs to be replaced by honouring a commitment to the immediate and internal security needs of his province instead. They are not always connected.
More importantly, there is underlying tension between the Punjab-led centre and Khan’s government. This is harmful. If polio vaccines are not being delivered on time or salaries for Lady Health Workers not being released for their critical work then this petty politics will only harm the people.
On the other hand, the shrieking hawks and silent doves in the PTI are equally to blame for Khan’s paranoid rant on electoral results 2013 and magnetic attraction to Islamist parties. The atrophied Islamists’ only purpose seems to be to disrupt and derail civilian democracy and they only serve as opportunist puppets.
It seems Khan is eager to even dissolve and sacrifice the KP government at the first chance while looking for opportunities that may dislodge the PML-N from the centre.
In contrast to the energy in KP, Balochistan may as well be wiped off from the imaginary of Pakistan. No forum, no aman ki asha, no NGO, no bleeding heart liberals or pious Islamists are politically committed to their cause. Punjab is a capitalist garrison with a sort-of human face but the fact is that it is committed and delivering on that front, as most conservative governments are able to.
Khan’s miscalculation is that he keeps looking in the rear-view window on his travel from Islamabad to Peshawar. Such myopia is blinding him from recognising that several constituencies in Sindh in 2013 showed that they too were inspired by his promise of change. Who can blame them? Observing the pathetic health, educational and economic situation of the despairing, bright and deserving peoples of Sindh outside of Karachi makes one believe that the worst punishment on the people of Sindh is their unimaginative and selfish leadership.
The lesson over this past year seems to be that we need to quit our hyper-nationalism and the over-drive to prove some abstract thing called ‘patriotism’. Instead, we would be better off proving our credentials as provincial compatriots. It is more patriotic to serve the people than lead them or a nation.
The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com