Saturday, January 12, 2013

Why Pakistan has to wait for it's Tahrir moment?



Recent political situation in Pakistan has given hopes to leaders and public of a Tahrir like revolution in Pakistan. In my view, that's a distant dream, far from reality at the moment.

First, the energies of the protesters were focused against one enemy and one demand - Hosni Mubarik and new leadership. In Pakistan, the fight against status-quo is not against one figure/department/political party; it's against the whole system. In the current scenario, it is difficult to separate party affiliations and prejudice from people and to bring them to one demand; to create unity among diversity.

Secondly, unfortunately, unlike Egypt, face of Chief Executive changes in Pakistan; at times with delay but it does happen through elections or coups, regularly. Egyptians suffered from the hands of Hosni for good three decades, and their frustration helped them to remove him from the reigns of power. We are suffering for more than six decades, in our case, the tormentor gets changed again and again. This makes it real difficult to give a face to our enemy; makes it impossible to identify the enemy. That's why conspiracy theories and evolution of our thinking, from time to time, has led to confusion in identifying the enemy - sometimes we blame the army, politicians, bureaucrats and/or the general public even.

What we need to understand is that our enemy # 1 is the mismanagement in governance which is the root cause to all of our problems - sectarianism, inflation, unemployment, terrorism, crime, rape, non development of infrastructure , education, corruption and health.

We need to stand against it, we have to demand reform in politics, judiciary, bureaucracy, military and in ourselves. We need to stop choosing the lesser evil, we have to stop compromising.

To get rid of our Chaing Kai Sheks, King Louis XVI, Musharrafs, Mubaraks, Ben Alis - we need to stand united against those who are evil by choice; not by mistake.

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