The Wrong Man

In the past few years social activism via key­boards has real­ly increased in Pak­istan, whether said key­board is con­nect­ed to a PC, a lap­top or a cell phone. From SMS spam­ming to wed­ding invi­ta­tions and from polit­i­cal activism to rev­o­lu­tion, every­thing seems to start from a key­board and quite often ends with a fiery argu­ment on the same set of keys.

Gone are the days when too much time spent on PCs or cell phones would cause sus­pi­cion among par­ents about a pos­si­ble girl­friend of boyfriend. The sce­nario has changed, with par­ents now assum­ing their kids must be engag­ing in some form of activism or the oth­er.

I myself am not tech savvy, but neces­si­ty has always been the moth­er of inven­tion. It took me ages to final­ly set up accounts on Face­book, Twit­ter and oth­er social net­work­ing sites, and then learn how to use them. How­ev­er, when I final­ly did get con­nect­ed I had the chance to inter­act with some youths dur­ing the 2013 Gen­er­al Elec­tions, both online and offline. The peo­ple I spoke to seemed real­ly enthu­si­as­tic and polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed, and for the first time I per­son­al­ly expe­ri­enced young peo­ple under­stand­ing the impor­tance of their vote and urg­ing their friends and fam­i­ly to vote as well. They were all geared up for a ‘New Pak­istan’. And yet at the same time, some of these same peo­ple thought noth­ing of vio­lat­ing traf­fic rules just to get to the polling sta­tion on time.

I then real­ized that for peo­ple moral­i­ty and respect for the law had zero val­ue while they some­how felt the vote would change every­thing. What change were they look­ing for exact­ly? I once had a Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion with a ‘change-sup­port­ing-lady’ and decid­ed to ask her direct­ly “Why do you want your can­di­date to be Prime Min­is­ter?” Her reply was the fol­low­ing: “Because he won us the crick­et World Cup”.

I have to admit the reply real­ly shook me, but after the ini­tial moments of shock it got me think­ing. If we as a nation believe that win­ning a World Cup is qual­i­fi­ca­tion enough to become Prime Min­is­ter then does­n’t Younus Khan deserve to become Chief Min­is­ter of one of the provinces? What about Roshan Khan, Jehangir Khan and Jan Sher Khan for their con­tri­bu­tion to squash? They hoist­ed the nation­al flag for years, so per­haps they at least deserve one Fed­er­al Min­istry each. And let’s not for­get Has­san Sar­dar, Sami Ullah, Islah Uddin and Shah­baz Senior — the Nation­al Games leg­ends — as well as all the box­ers, snook­er play­ers and ath­letes like Naseem Hameed that have rep­re­sent­ed us at pres­ti­gious forums like the Olympics and the Asian Games.

While think­ing all this the thought also struck me that the ICC World Cup is going to take place next year in Aus­tralia, once again giv­ing the Pak­istan team a chance to bring the Cup back home under the lead­er­ship of Cap­tain Mis­bah Ul Haq (also known as ‘tuk tuk’, infa­mous for his slow and depress­ing bat­ting style). Just imag­ine if Mis­bah were to win us the World Cup in 2015 and 21 years lat­er we decid­ed to elect him as Prime Min­is­ter for this achieve­ment. I’m not say­ing that win­ning a tro­phy is an easy task but we need to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between win­ning an award, being a best sell­er and run­ning a state. We respect our stars for their ded­i­ca­tion, skill, per­for­mance and con­tri­bu­tion to their coun­try but these stars can­not auto­mat­i­cal­ly become suc­cess­ful lead­ers.

What we need to focus on is replac­ing the bad politi­cians with good ones, and this will only come from an under­stand­ing that the polit­i­cal sys­tem we have today is a reflec­tion of our own soci­ety. Cor­rup­tion is endem­ic at all lev­els, not just at the very top. And any clean­ing up of this sys­tem will be a long and time-con­sum­ing process. It is impos­si­ble for things to mag­i­cal­ly improve in the blink of an eye, and any­body who claims so is sim­ply fool­ing us with tall claims, false promis­es and con­tra­dic­to­ry state­ments.

In fact things start get­ting worse when the dif­fer­ence between what you say and what you do becomes ever more glar­ing­ly obvi­ous. When your stances change more quick­ly than your clothes. When you claim to fight the sta­tus quo with the feu­dal sit­ting next to you. When your nar­ra­tives on key nation­al issues are tai­lored accord­ing to your con­ve­nience. When you con­demn drone attacks stand­ing next to the For­eign Min­is­ter of Pak­istan who was in charge the moment these attacks start­ed tak­ing place. When you talk about an equal edu­ca­tion sys­tem and the lady who owns one of the most elit­ist school sys­tems of the coun­try holds a strong deci­sion-mak­ing posi­tion in your par­ty. I can go on and on, but from where I’m stand­ing this is cer­tain­ly not ‘the change’ that lady was argu­ing with me on Twit­ter for, or that young boy broke the traf­fic sig­nal for. This is not ‘the change’ our youth was con­vinc­ing each oth­er to go and vote for. This is not The Change, and you are not ‘The Right Man’.