Pakistan: The Real Scandal Is Silence – OpEd
Maulana Fazlur Rehman has mastered a certain kind of politics that is needed and despised by Pakistan. Needs, because parliamentary arithmetic is inclined to force deal making. Despair, because deal making is too easily a commoditized business that is losing its values and selling trust. He is not the only gamer in this game, but perhaps one of the most glaring examples of it, a man, who can speak the language of faith in the morning and the language of power in the evening, and then ask the country to think of the two as being the same moral enterprise.
It is what makes a resonance in the discourse of his so-called assets. It is houses and plots in Dera Ismail Khan, bungalow in Islamabad, flat and shops in Peshawar, Karachi and Quetta, agriculture land attached to this or that place, and even a flat in Dubai, when people hear that this is the wealth of this or that politician, they do not think of it only once. They speculate on the larger tendency: the people see the politicians rise to the office of trust through the medium of elections, and the religious schemes of it, but the rumour of their existence which accosts them is that of the corporates of tycoons. They are either sponged with reality, or they are inoculated with distrust.
It should be mentioned that it is necessary to be very blunt that accusations do not constitute confessions. A list of forwards is not a piece of evidence. It is not a court ruling during the press conference of a rival. Neither courtroom is politics. Politics is run based on legitimacy and legitimacy is pegged on credibility. When the circle of a leader is suspected of buying high value land through the help of known and trusted middlemen or subject to dubious land distribution subject to review, people have a reasonable question why do we think that the individual is different than other members of the elite? When it is just anger and slogans, the leader is losing something even in situations when he never loses any case.
The flowing information is of a certain taste. They have not only money, but land, portions and authority. The narrative reveals how the agricultural land was distributed and reneged, how the land was reclaimed by the government through investigations, how the land was acquired way below the market, and that the front men operated businesses. That is all the provinces have been told the Pakistanis, always. It is also that kind of a story which cannot be easily disproved with the help of speeches because the population is aware of how power operates in the district level. It requires paperwork, stamps, and even ordinary citizens that cannot even manage to get a patwari to correct an error in the procedure that people with powerful statuses procure land as a privilege.
Maulana Fazlur Rehman needs to comprehend that the bar is now elevated higher when he wants to be seen as a national leader rather than a power broker of an organization. In the past, a religious identity was protecting, and the critics were listening to the politicians. That deference is fading. The young voters do not necessarily accord moral credit to anybody, not to generals, not to judges, not to clerics, not to populists. They want proof. They would like accruing receipts, registers, tax returns and schedules. They would like to know how someone on politics can create his or her fortunes that seem to have a diversified portfolio in the cities and even across the national borders. It is not the hostility to religion. Accountability is one of the essential needs of the state where ordinary citizens are taxed, fined, and policed on an everyday basis.
In the meantime, the accountability system as such cannot be trusted. Institutions have become the weapon of war of Pakistan against their enemies and treasure troves of allies. That creates a toxic cycle. In the case of a politician under investigation, they are victimized by his/her supporters, and this is not necessarily false. A deal is a situation in which a politician gets away and in certain cases the opponents might be right. Not only in such a context, but Maulana Fazlur Rahman will also always be able to charge political targeting, and his rivals will always be able to charge veiled protection. The ordinary citizens are given two versions of narrations and no believable referee. That is why the weight is shifted back to the politician. In cases where institutions fail to create trust, one can only turn to personal transparency to bring back trust.
His fans ought to pose a better question, which is interested in themselves. In case a religious party wishes to obtain an ethical requirement in political existence, it must satisfy a greater criterion of financial well-being than political parties founded on ethnic belonging, partisan affiliation, or family wealth. Otherwise, it is religion which promptly becomes a vote-seeking advertisement brand, and faith itself is mewling in the gutter of the worldliness peddle. This is even more sensitive when land and madrasas are also at stake. People start doubting that charity and religion may be coupled with the personal wealth creation, yet that is not necessarily so. The only way of avoiding that suspicion will be separation, documentation, and open accounting.