Welcome to Yarghamalistan

Absurdistan, Londonistan… its my turn now to coin a new term with the fashionable 'istan' suffix. I have come up with a new name for Pakistan, one which captures the leitmotif of where we are at right now:  Yarghamalistan. Prounounced thus: yar-ghamaaal-istaan.

It struck me in a lightning flash of insight during a conversation  with my husband and Shahid Khan, architect and visionary behind Indus Earth Trust, an NGO dedicated to improving the life of the coastal and rural ultra-poor. We had been on our way our to Gharo near Thatta (known in ancient times as Bhambore) to check out the model mud and straw houses Shahid was training masons to build. They had been brought down from the flood-afflicted areas to the north to skill them up as a prelude to building 500 homes in Sajawal for their fellow flood victims.

Village girl helping to make a giant flag for Pakistan Day with IET

During our guftegoo  (chitchat) I aired my profound puzzlement at the missing links in the topography of Pakistani society’s current woes. For some time now I have been trying to connect the dots between what I know of Pakistanis on a personal, interactive basis with the ‘government’ and its manifold weaknesses, like rife corruption, shambolic lack of foresight and planning, ethical shallowness, sloganeering politics, endemic nepotism etc. Where individuals seem to be so capable and proactive, dedicated to serving their fellow countrymen, the institutions that are supposed to represent the interests of the citizens are quite simply failing to meet the needs of the people. In my personal experience I am always awestruck by  the numerous stellar qualities I find in Pakistanis: qualities of perseverance, considerable ability, ingenuity, generosity, selflessness, warmth and hospitality. For some time now  I’ve been working at figuring out this disconnect without much success.

Mid-conversation and mid-way to Gharo, what struck me was that on every level, and for every sector of society, we are  - to a man, woman and child -  being held hostage. In Urdu yarghamal is being held hostage. It’s such a deliciously wild sounding word - slightly out of control and lightly crazed. Maybe it’s the guttural ‘gh’ sound that invokes a sense of being ferile and lawless – or is it the atavistic sounding  ‘yar’?  And without the ‘Pa’ sound of 'Pakistan' it cannot be spat out with the contempt that ‘Pakistan’ is often vocalized with abroad (viz the British insult: ‘Paki’). There’s something of a usurping air about ‘Yarghamalistan’.

Life in Pakistan is, for now, a multi-layered exercise in being held hostage  (for most) or taking hostage (for the lawless few). At every stage and level we can pinpoint a hostage situation of how  Pakistan has become  a ‘yarghamal’-infused society. Even while it has a free press, no matter how sharp the criticism is, nothing much seems to change. A paralytic inertia has seeped through the life-blood of the body politic.  Even while its conscientious citizens know how badly we are suffering the shortfall in civil institutions that work effectively, whatever they do to support them is like a minnow swimming against the tsunami of looming disaster. 90% of the population is held hostage to poverty, illiteracy, poor health care, inadequate housing, apartheid in education and the hideously unjust distribution of wealth and access to means to improve their state.

Take your average urban domestic servant. He or she is held hostage by many things:  ignorance,  debt, the serf mentality. Without you acting in loco parentis and the nanny state, where would he be? Who would service the debt he took to marry off one of his five daughters and feed the village for a week but which he would have to live for several hundred years at his current salary (and loan-shark interest)  in order to repay?  Held hostage to his lack of foresight and to suffocating social customs, he is then held further hostage to the outrageously inadequate salary rates he is paid, to the crippling inflation imposed on him by an alien economic system, to excessive working hours by abusive employers and scanty benefits.

Every wife/daughter/sister is held hostage by a society that narrowly defines what a woman can and cannot do.  Nowadays she can by all means go for a career, but marriage will take its toll as a single, childless woman is barely visible, if not deemed a threat or prey. It’s a social truism that among the middle classes a medical degree makes you more marriageable yet if she doesn’t practice, she is a waste of resources. Women are held hostage to the lack of free and unharassed movement  - have you ever seen a woman on a bike or scooter here? With the exception of the Sunday rides of the funtastic Critical Mass Karachi bicycling group that include privileged women in the toney area of Defence, custom and taboo dictate that the only forms of transport women can drive are their own cars. She can have a career but she still has to look like a Stepford wife a la Pakistanienne: long straightened black hair, lacquered talons, dizzyingly frothy fashions and all the accoutrements  and accessories aped from the coffers of European or American fashion. We are fully able to auto-clone without the help of science here, but  woe betide her if she ever gets too tanned or too ruggedly rustic, for that is to betray the ‘Fair and Lovely’ ideal of whiteness women are held hostage to.

If your project is to build a school in a suburb of Karachi you will be held hostage to a dizzying cascade of chai-pani (literally 'tea-water', i.e. palm-greasing) dole-outs,  ‘fines’, or straight up rishwat (bribery). If you own a manufacturing company you may be held hostage to a certain political party’s extortionate protection racket controlling the locality. And being taken hostage for ransom is an occupational hazard for most industrialist families. Some have left either because this happened to them or out of fear that it might.

The most insidious form of Yarghamali practice is the political deployment of religion. Certain sectors of society have draped the flag of Islam over the politics of this country and are holding it hostage to their claim to the moral high ground, leaving those who espouse ideals of tolerant but equitable democratic governance grasping for paradigms of virtue that can translate into the minds of our illiterate and disenfranchised, but religiously sensitive masses. After all, who wants to displease God, when our Fate is really in His hands? Confusion about the very identity of Pakistan as a country for Muslims or an Islamic state still occupies the popular mind. Added to that is the way the icons of progress and advanced (i.e. 'western') civilization and their vassals have infringed the sovereignty of this nation, how is the simple citizen to make any sense of how a secular state can ensure the rights of all its citizens to practise their religion with tolerance and brotherhood. Islamists persuasively tout the argument that abandonment of religion has brought us to this mess, and all that is needed is to reinstate their version of Islam for the milk and honey to flow once more. Meanwhile the secularists are held hostage to the burden of separating the taint of  neo-colonial enterprises from models of progress and social justice that are themselves, after all, spawned evolutionarily out of the industrialization of Europe and the ‘West’, and therefore suspect as foreign and ‘un-Islamic’.

Who will negotiate our release from Yarghamalistan? No one but us. There is no saviour out there. Candidates in the upcoming elections are each pandering to the collective need for a Messiah, but not one of them will be able to deliver what Yarghamalistan needs to become Pakistan. Not in one term of office, nor two. It going to take a few generations, for our fate is also woven into the geo-politics of the region, the insidious modern version of the Great Game. The only saviours are ourselves: we have to save ourselves from being held hostage to our own ignorance, fears and small-mindedness. The negotiations are going to be tough.