With a barrage of challenges awaiting the incoming government, Pakistan’s cyclical dystopia perseveres. Another meaningless election. Another debilitated government. Another divided house. And round and round we go.
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing truly dies.” — Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption
For Rehan Shamsi, 61, hope is a double-edged sword. A seasoned participant in Pakistan’s tumultuous political history, Rehan was but a 25-year-old engineering student in Karachi when the death knell sounded on General Ziaul Haq’s decade-long stint at the country’s helm.
Amid cheers of hope and merriment, Benazir Bhutto assumed the reins of power in the winter of 1988 — an event considered to be a critical inflection point in the country’s long, agonising crusade to democracy. It seemed the sun had finally dawned on a people downtrodden by decades of shattered promises and dead aspirations.
“I don’t think today’s generation understands the optimism that permeated the air in ’88. It was a genuine moment of hope. I know it sounds idealistic now, but you have to understand where we were,” reminisced Rehan. An active member of the National Students Federation and a worker of the Qaumi Mahaz-e-Azadi Party in the 80s, he vehemently believed in and campaigned for Benazir’s Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD).
“My parents migrated from our village in Lucknow in 1948 because they believed in the inherent freedoms this country promised. They died waiting for things to change, for the suffering to stop.” he lamented. “During the MRD, some of my friends were publicly flogged. Many were imprisoned. So when we finally won the right to vote, we knew what it meant. For the first time in our lives, it felt like we had a seat at the table. So I know the sanctity of the vote. We sweat and bled for it. All my life, I had waited for it.”
More than three decades later, Rehan is still waiting.
Cyclical dystopias
Today, the country stands at yet another inflection point. During his days in the PDM government, then foreign-minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, in a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press, characterised Pakistan as navigating a “perfect storm” of crises — a plummeting economic outlook, a hyper-polarised and hyper-partisan political arena, a Parliament in disarray, a judicature in disrepute, a blatant security challenge on its Western frontier, and the resurgence of terrorism on the country’s fringes. With elections less hardly a week away, not much seems poised to change.
“If nothing else, elections are a time when people should be hopeful of change,” said Rehan. In an alternative universe, one in which the electoral process had maintained some semblance of integrity, perhaps it could have been. However, at the time of writing, one of the largest (and by most accounts, most popular) players in Pakistan’s political colosseum remains largely decapitated.
Imran Khan, stripped of his party position and his eligibility to contest the elections, remains incarcerated within the walls of Adiala, a graveyard for democratic procedure. Fractured and decrepit, the party remains unable to hold public rallies. Perchance it opts for a virtual power show or fundraiser, “technical glitches” lead to mysterious internet disruptions nationwide. Robbed of its election symbol and with a massive target on its back, prospects for the PTI seem bleak. It’s a book Rehan has read again and again in the 90s, then in the 2000s and then again in the 2010s. He knows how it ends.
