Let us pray for the dawn of a system in Pakistan that will be pregnant with results

Pakistan’s future hinges on two factors.
How will our leadership crisis be resolved? Linked with this question is the question of governance. Which system of government will eventually prevail and in which form?
What shape the policies of President Obama of America will eventually acquire, after the present phase is over, in which he is doing no more than handling the fallout of the adventurous deeds of his predecessor.
Of these factors, the first one is related to our own political dynamics. It has been frequently argued that most of the ills and ailments that have eaten away the moral fibre of our society and rendered our institutions too helpless to do what they were required to do, are the outcome of the country’s frequent and long deviations into the realm of military dictatorship. There is considerable evidence to substantiate this perception. Yet it cannot be ignored in this context that most of the ills and ailments that the military dictatorships are known to have created were due to their unholy alliances with the opportunistic politicians whose ‘services’ were required to create facades of ‘democratic’ governance. This practice deprived the country of ‘the good’ that the said dictatorships could have brought, had they chosen to act in the best interests of the country rather than to follow political expediencies. For example, the ill-starred Kalabagh Dam would have become a ‘productive’ reality long time back, and the Indian influence in the anti-Punjab camp wouldn’t have succeeded in making such a great economic necessity into a political issue.
It has also been argued that democratic culture needs some time and breathing space to flourish and produce results.
The problem here is that democracy happens to be the rule of the majority. And majority in Pakistan’s context belongs to Punjab which has been ‘fashionably’ and conveniently singled out for the charge of acting in an imperial style. This of course has been done by those lobbies which are keen to create some ‘sting’ for their minority voice.
The second factor is the Obama factor. Will he ever be able to do away with the imperial policies of the Bush era? Will he succeed in creating enough ‘firepower’ in a more inward-looking and ‘morally just’ America, to abandon the long-endeared and long-adopted American policies of imperialistic expansion?
This subject of ‘Pakistan’s chances to stage a turnaround in the future’ needs a more detailed analysis.
In this limited space only a ‘hint’ or two can be dropped.
Let us pray for Obama’s ‘chances’ against the imperialism that has been practiced for long by America.
And let us pray for the dawn of a system in Pakistan that will be pregnant with results.
(This Column was first published on 05-06-2009)