They are a strange mob. They come from the Left, the Right and the Centre. What unites them is a blind faith in the sanctity of the constitution as it exists today as if it were some holy scripture. To them, the continuation of the Nawaz government is the end-all of our democratic process. They echo the US State Department. And they’d do anything to undermine the political significance of what’s happening outside the consensus-ridden parliament. They roar to convince us that they’d lay down their lives to save our parliamentary system.
Among them are the self-righteous and hypocritical custodians of our culture who are incensed that youngsters are dancing at the PTI sit-in. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that these youngsters are dancing to express their collective joy, something people have done for centuries from Gwadar to Gilgit. If dancing was so alien to our culture, how do we explain the luddi and the laiva, the dhamal and the bhangra? Or are all those breaking into dance at festivals and weddings, sports matches and election victories not Pakistanis? Why does the Pakistan National Council of the Arts maintain a troupe of folk dancers that showcases all these and so many other folk dances for visiting foreign dignitaries?
The puritanical sensibilities of these self-proclaimed guardians of a culture that has nothing to do with our people is not ruffled by the vulgar mujras performed in theatre halls and broadcast 24/7 on cable channels, the pelvic thrusts of film heroes and heroines adorning our big and small screens. It is alright for that kind of dancing, enacted to arouse lust and done for money, to pollute our public space. But somehow, when youngsters dance to express joy, it is an attack on our cultural values. So forget the political aspirations of the dancing youth, the ideals that sound music to their ears, and condemn them for dancing.
Interestingly, standing right by their side, are our liberal secular, drinking dancing, champions of human rights and democracy. It’s not the dancing that bothers them. They are not happy that the political idiom of PTI refers to God and religion. They are not happy that the protesters have chosen a narrative that does not fit into their neo-liberal bibles and the white man’s burden that they carry like happy slaves on their NGOized shoulders. They believe in human rights alright, but they are unmoved when a brutal police force is unleashed on the protesting crowd, killing some of them and injuring hundreds more. In fact, they demand from the government to mow them all down.
Also coming to the rescue of our damsel of democracy in perpetual distress, are leaders of what we call the Left. They are not happy that the PTI revolution is not couched in Marxist dogma. It is not good enough that the protesting leaders talk about the have-nots and blame the oligarchy of feudal and corporate interests for their trouble. It is not good enough that they challenge the maulanas in our midst and their extremist hate-filled ideologies. More than anything else, I guess they are unhappy because a party that they dismissed as the Right is successfully articulating a political consciousness that they failed to take beyond their conferences and small pockets of cadre brainwashed in dialectical materialism.
And of course, there are ethnic nationalists of all hues, absorbed in the mainstream for pieces of the power-pie but flashing their ethnic cards for credibility among their voters every now and then. There are centrist so-called progressive parties like the PPP that once upon a time spoke for the downtrodden but clearly showed its anti-poor face during its last stint under Zardari’s dictatorship. And there are banned sectarian militant outfits and their equally hate-filled sectarian political front-men. Everybody’s out to save our parliamentary system (read the House of Sharif) and our oh-so-sacred constitution.
Not to be left behind is the US State Department. With a straight face its spokespersons remind us that violence and destruction of private property and government buildings are not acceptable means of resolving political differences. After its high officials distributed free cookies and coffee to protesters in Kiev and its embassy there orchestrated a violent coup against Ukraine’s elected government with the help of mercenary fascists there who took over and torched government buildings and public property, the US has the cheek to tell us that it is strongly opposed to any efforts to impose extra-constitutional change to the political system.
The US thinks it is okay to destabilize the elected Venezuelan government, to fund subversion in Cuba and Russia, to nurture, fund, arm, train and unleash agents of violence in Syria, Libya and across the length and breadth of the African continent. So why is it so pushed about saving our political system (read the Nawaz government)? Don’t we know that the only systems that it doesn’t want saved are those that don’t dance to its anti-people tunes?
This is not to suggest that there’s nothing wrong with the PTI protest and its leadership. But the hypocritical noise of its political opponents has drowned the chances of any valid criticism of the party to inform the political discourse. Besides, the PTI leadership is articulating issues that are central to our democracy project and speak to the heart of a huge majority that has no stakes in the elitist system that the unlikely foot-soldiers, champions and grand-daddies of democracy are all united to save.
The challenge that the PTI dharna poses to our rotten constitutional democracy could move things forward and lead to much-needed and much-delayed reforms. Unfortunately, the hypocritical alliance of our democracy-lovers with their hollow black-and-white cries about saving the constitution has reduced the opportunity to a tribal war. On one side are the dancing youngsters with hope and dreams in their eyes of a better society. And on the other side, is the disparate mob of democracy-lovers baying for their blood, clutching the sinking boat of a constitution stripped of any real substance.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
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