The living dead

The constitution of a country means the rule of the dead over the living. A constitutional amendment means an insult inflicted on the dead by the living. A nations reverence or irreverence for its dead is determined by the number of amendments that it makes in the constitution, which it has inherited from its dead politicians. The more the amendments, the more the irreverence The fewer the amendment, the more the reverence No amendment means blind worshipping of the dead. We havent liked our dead politicians very much. We have made many amendments in our constitution. It means that we have been insulting our dead politicians. The dead must be cursing us in their graves. They must be ruing having given birth to amendments/insulters like ourselves. The constitution of a country is the supreme law of the land. Thus in every country, which has inherited a constitution from the past, the supremacy belongs to the dead. The dead command. The living obey. All the White Houses of the world are being ruled by the brown underground mud houses of the dead. Our world is in a torrential flux. Things are changing, as they have never changed before. What is terribly vital at one moment suddenly collapses into an utter absurdity the very next moment. In such a world, the political wisdom of the dead enshrined in a constitution is an absolute anachronism. He who is searching for political enlightenment in a constitution inherited from the past is searching for sunshine at the bottom of the Pacific. Unfortunately, we believe that a dead politician becomes wiser after his death. We never realise that the dead politicians use us as their tools. The ambitions which they failed to achieve during their lifetime, they endeavour to achieve posthumously. It is believed that when a man leaves for his eternal abode, he leaves everything behind. It is true only of the ordinary man. It is not true of the politician. The ordinary man dies truly, sincerely and selflessly. But when a politician dies, he carries an axe to his grave. Lets have a look at our democracy, which is functioning under the national constitution. If only one candidate files nomination papers for a certain constituency, he is declared elected unopposed by the Election Commission. This is absolutely ridiculous. What makes the Commission presume that if a particular candidate is not opposed by some other candidate, he is ipso facto the darling of the voters of the constituency? Maybe, the majority of the voters of the constituency hate his guts. Only the voters must be the final arbiters, not the Election Commission. Logically, even if there is a single candidate in the fray for a particular assembly seat, the voters of that constituency must be asked to vote for or against the single candidate. Maybe, more votes are cast against him than in his favour. Declaring a candidate elected unopposed arbitrarily bypassing the ballot box is a mockery of democracy. Not consulting the voters is insulting the voters. The insulting tradition must be discarded. Liberation from an incurably miserable life is possible in two ways. Either one should commit suicide or beseech someone for mercy killing. Unfortunately, both the remedies are disallowed by our law. The law desires that we should enjoy our misery-agonies. If the agonies prolong themselves, we should fully cooperate. Sometimes a tyrant unwittingly makes certain mistakes, which benefit his victim. The law has proved itself to be such a tyrant. Of course, it has closed the suicidal door. But it has unwittingly left a backdoor open for the liberation of the death-yearner. He is allowed to commit suicide by casting his vote into the ballot-box. The ballot-box is a replica of a coffin. Nothing kills a miserable poor voter in a poor country like democracy The misery of the masses has always been a gift of the rulers. Since only misery was in the gift of the rulers, they gifted the masses only misery. One must not look a gift horse in the mouth. One must look at the sentiments of the gift-giver. If a common Pakistani expects an elephant as a gift, he must have lost his National Identity Card. What a common Pakistani deserves is determined by the rulers. But what the rulers deserve is determined by the rulers themselves. The rulers firmly believe that they deserve everything that is there under the sun. They deserve to own even the sun itself The writer retired as professor of the Department of English, Government College University, Lahore.