Though every eclipse of the year germinates wishes, dreams, and aspirations in the minds of people across the world, rarely do we realise that wishes work only when we do. And, more importantly, only when we are allowed to wish and work on them. That is, when individual and collective interests or, more appropriately, rulers and ruled, see eye to eye, the outcomes of underlying wishes inclusively materialise. However, rulers in our country have evolved such a system that operates according to the wishes of the powerful, and in a manner that has left little space for the needs, let alone wishes, as humans of the ruled. And that was not out of the blue.
For decades, the playbook (not the Constitution), indexed on brute force, fear, coercion, and deception, subjected people to unquestioning allegiance to a handful of powerful institutions and individuals, all in the name of democracy, national security, and patriotism. Even beyond this, people sacrificed their wishes, efforts, and years for repeatedly betrayed promises of inclusive prosperity.
Lately, and to their utter dismay, however, people began to discover the fruits of their labour of sweat and blood amassed offshore or in the fortified palaces of the powerful. The discovery of truth beneath the stockpiles of the public exchequer, the façade of democracy, the sacred book of the Constitution, and the glittering robes of clergy and judges, and the ‘kleptocratic bureaucracy’, revealed to people the bitter fact that all the fruits of democracy, people’s labour, struggles, and hardships did not go into coffers that were also used for the people. Not for people’s well-being, however, but to keep them in darkness, deception, and the age of Pakistan Studies and “unquestioning allegiance”.
The lesson taught the masses another lesson, put here in a rather metaphoric way: whether a malady can remedy its host. The prognosis also taught the people something else: wishing for decent public living is not a pragmatic wish, but wishing against those who wished against us, or who kept us for decades from wishing for a dignified life is. Since wishes work only when they are allowed to, wishing good things in a system that conspires against and wishes bad things is rarely more than wishful thinking. These wishful wishes have been, perhaps, the very thinking that kept people enslaved to, unquestionably aligned with, and funding and strengthening, a system of brute power and deception.
The people, this year around, might have mostly wished for salvation rather than personal gains or achievements
What did you wish for this year, either? Is it more about personal achievements that the system deliberately prevents us from attaining, or the salvation of the system itself?
The people, this year around, might have mostly wished for salvation rather than personal gains or achievements. They might have invoked the divine against the architects and beneficiaries of this system, the puppets of power, the symbols of brute force, and the personifications of barbaric dispositions. People might have cursed, condemned, and insulted them as their New Year wishes.
You might question: who does most of the public cursing, invoking, and abuse as a symbol of protest against pandemic persecution, and to whom is it deservedly directed? Kevin Alfred Strom answers this as follows: “To determine the true rulers of society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not (openly and publicly) permitted to criticise?” The rest follow for all others.
Those wished against by the public would not have sat idle either. They, like the public, might not have wished the way they worked for three-quarters of a century. They might not have wished for an addition to their power over people, or riches rarely is anything left in the country but for the consolidation of brute force and the trembling dread of the system. The lost allure of lies. The fear of heresy and treason. The cloak of the clergy. Of personal and institutional loyalty.
They might have wished for the passing of the genie of awareness, the “satanic” digital tools, and questioning, and summoned the “glorious” age of ignorance. And Pakistan Studies.
But then, perhaps in a sigh of desperation, they might have realised that wishes were no longer the horses. If wishes were, they would have, once again, “horsed” the wishes and awareness of the folk and the truth, and would have fed the system with the elixir of life altogether.
But alas, wishes are no longer the horses or horses worth riding.