Whose justice, what rationality?

One of the most disturbing and negative aspects of being a citizen of this country and of living in this country is related to the lack of justice in our society. Breakdowns in law and order are a major part of the story, but not the whole of it. The other, almost equally important, aspects have to do with possibilities of being victims of random acts of violence or terror, victims of unjust, unfair and pernicious actions of the state and its various organs, and victims of military rule. These lead to the entrenchment of the loss of our dignity and humanity at the hands of a powerful oligarchy of the rich. We end up being worse than slaves: reduced to mental slavery, with little self-respect, dethroned from the mantel of being ‘humans’.

All citizens of Pakistan share this fate. The rich might feel that they are different, but they are not. We have deposed and hanged enough Prime Ministers, placed plenty of ministers and parliamentarians behind bars, jailed enough bureaucrats and businessmen, and seen plenty of rich people have their fortunes overturned quickly to really believe that they are not ‘less human’ as we all have become. The Generals, the military officers and the judges might think they are different, but they too share the same fate. Ask any man on the street how much respect these individuals or these institutions carry now, and the answer puts all of us to shame. All we can feel is sorrow: sorrow at the loss of our humanity, at the loss of our potential and at the loss of our being.

Sometime back we had interviewed around 15 Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs from Karachi. The idea was to get a sense of the kind of problems they were facing. Almost all of them mentioned that law and order was one of the major problems (these interviews date from the Musharraf government days). Two or three of them had had their children kidnapped for ransom or threatened, some of them had already settled their children abroad (dual nationality), and at least two of these fifteen people had been robbed recently, and one had even had his father killed in a holdup. Is this what a society is all about? Should we expect these people to stay in the country, and should we expect them to invest and expand their businesses?

Even more absurdly, there are a number of my acquaintances who have been held up, on open roads of non-Karachi urban centers, and in daylight, and have lost their cars, money and other possessions. None of them, very fortunately, lost their lives, but we read about these cases in newspapers all the time.

It is not just the case that there is lack of law and order in the society, it is more that there is injustice in this society. The police and judicial systems are dysfunctional to the point that no aggrieved party, if they are not ‘well connected’, wants to go to these institutions to seek redress. The robbers know that too. A number of people who have been held up, robbed, abused or even had their relatives kidnapped have had to bear the indignity and the loss in silence. Getting raped once is tragedy enough. To be a victim more than once, and at the hands of the very institutions that are supposed to protect the individual, is tragedy beyond comprehension. But many of us go through the pain almost every other day.

And then it is the indignities of the everyday that hurt. Being stopped at the many pickets in the city, being asked for the ‘nikahnama’ by a barely literate and very abusive police-officer, standing in queues to pay bills, being harassed by personnel from the various utilities, being made to wait on the road just before iftar so that the Presidential cavalcade can go through, being forced to pay bribes to get almost anything done, being forced off the road by military vehicles, being forced to put up with lousy service from the national airline, the railway, the power provider, the telephone provider, the water provider, the garbage collector….how long should the list be.

A police van stopped a car on a blind corner. Two cars following the first car could not see what was happening and so ended up piling into each other. This happened in one of the top suburbs of the city. The drivers of the two cars that collided got out of the car and went to the police van to protest this thoughtless action on their part. But before they could get far with the protest the ASI said ‘I am not your father’s servant that I should worry about you’ and drove off. The level and the enunciation might be distinct, but this is no different from what other powerful institutions and individuals are saying to the rest of the country.

And one has not even talked of the larger injustices prevailing in the society. The Prime Minister, in his maiden speech, said categorically that there would be no land reform even though he knows well that more than a third of Pakistan lives in poverty and has little hope of getting out of the poverty trap. He still felt it was important to reassure the large landholders. More than a third of the country has no access to decent schooling, health facilities, potable water, sewerage, electricity and so on. But the state has, despite this, thought it wise to remove wealth tax and some of the other taxes that could have been used as vehicles for effective redistribution.

What is still not understood by our society is that poverty or injustice is not only the problem of the individuals who face these situations, or of the perpetrators, it is the problem of each and every individual of this society. By slapping the traffic police cop on duty in Lahore, the perpetrators slapped all of us, all of our institutions, and more importantly, themselves too. Does the concerned General think that he has gained some ground for the army from this behavior? He has just reduced the worth of all humans in this society. When a teacher is handcuffed and arrested in Islamabad, it is not a slap in his face; it is a slap in the ministers’ face who had this done. He has made all of us smaller to some extent. The individuals in this society are connected to each other, through institutions, through shared history, present and the future, through the bonds of being ‘human’ (ala David Hume) and through the bonds of being ‘rational’ (ala Immanuel Kant). One person’s indignity is one step in the direction of the destruction of the society as a whole. Appreciation of this connectedness is what is missing from the vision of the present day leaders as well as intellectuals.

General Musharraf insists that Pakistan is a good place to invest in. Definitely, for sectors and people that are heavily protected by the state. But it is not a good place to live, invest in, and raise one’s children in for most of the rest. And the main reason behind this is the indignity and the insecurity that most of us have to face everyday of our lives. People are voting with their feet to show their discontent. There are thousands of highly skilled workers, entrepreneurs and investors, who might well have acquired their skills or their capital from Pakistan, or at least a part of it, who are emigrating from Pakistan every year. September 11 events have surely dampened the enthusiasm of many to go to the Western countries, but this is partly because the welcome from these countries has become less warm, it is not because living in Pakistan has become better. Even today, with all the stories of how Pakistanis and Muslims are treated in the United States and Canada and so on, there are thousands who queue up everyday to obtain visas to these countries, there are thousands whose applications for immigration are still in process, there are thousands who want to take ‘refuge’ in these countries, and there are thousands who are willing to pay almost a quarter of a million rupees to have a chance of making it to these countries even illegally or semi-legally.

Economic injustice is surely a large part of the explanation for the preference that people are revealing, but this is not the entire story. It is not the economically desperate alone who are leaving the country. For the entrepreneur and investor class, as well as for the very educated or skilled, Pakistan offers good returns, but for them, security, peace, safety, justice, for themselves and their children, is an issue. Consider the very simple calculus: Suppose patriotism and other connections with Pakistan gave you a ‘utility’ of 1000 units for living in Pakistan, but there was a 10 percent chance that you would face some form of grave injustice here (whatever the form) leading to a substantial loss to you, or your children (say –10,000), the overall value for living in Pakistan, even for a risk neutral person, gets reduced to –100 (1000*0.9-10,000*0.1). If another country offers even a positive value to living there, given that we may not have patriotic connections to it initially, even then people would emigrate. This is what is happening in the case of Pakistan. Of course, for risk-averse individuals, and most of us are risk-averse where our life and the lives of our loved ones are concerned, the incentive to migrate is even larger.

Life is tough in Pakistan. The lack of justice, fairness and rationality in our society imposes a heavy cost on all. It impedes us all from achieving our full potential of being human, and it reduces all of us to being less than human. For the poor, the challenges are doubly binding. Apart from the indignities mentioned above, they have to contend with economic injustice as well, and have to fight hard for mere survival. This cannot be equilibrium for a society. The fact that people are migrating, and not investing in this country should be an eye-opener for all of us. The question is that will we have the sagacity to bring in appropriate institutional, legal and other changes to significantly alter the path we are on. This is the challenge for us as a society, and as a polity.