SO THIS IS PAKISTAN !
Pakistan is one of the greatest landmarks of history and the Muslim nation may take legitimate pride in this achievement. We wonder, however, how many of us have taken the trouble to look at it from the viewpoint of those who are just now lying on our roadsides without a shelter over their heads with only a few rags to cover their bodies, spending these dreary winter nights shivering and not a few of them ultimately finding escape from their agonies in the welcome embrace of death. Long had these wretched souls strained their eyes during their tiresome and perilous trek from the East to watch for the boundary line of Pakistan which they had fondly hoped, would be the end of their miseries. But when on their arrival in this dreamland of theirs they found that Mother Pakistan had for them not even the proverbial stone to lay their heads on, their feelings may better be imagined than described. The above feelings of disillusionment – So This is Pakistan! – is the least that must have passed in the minds of the unfortunate men and women thus stranded in their thousands on the highways and byways of Pakistan.
This is a state of things which should make every citizen of Pakistan hang his head in shame and fill our hearts with the fear of Divine judgment being once more visited upon us. The hell we have just been through seems to have left us as inhuman in mind as ever and it seems we need another Tara Singh to whip us up to this elementary duty to fellowmen.
As regards the Punjab Government, which is directly concerned with the Refugee problem, the less said the better. They have just one stock argument to fling in your face. The work is “stupendous”, they tell you. If you ask them, why can’t you put these refugees in so many college and school buildings left by non-Muslims and are lying vacant, they tell you the work is “stupendous”. If you tell them, hundreds of houses in Hindu localities are still unoccupied why can’t Refugees be accommodated in them, they say the work is “stupendous”.If the work is stupendous, it is all the more an argument why we should make an all-out effort and strain every nerve. It certainly must not be used as shirking work. Most of the officers are busy doing just nothing.
The fact is it is sheer incapacity of and lack of imagination. The Lahore Deputy Commissioner, for instance, has launched a very laudable campaign to collect 50000 Razais (quilts) from the city of Lahore. Why couldn’t this be done earlier? Evacuation started in August. It is over four months now. It should have been somebody’s business to have foreseen the cruel cold of winter and made due provision against it. The Press had been issuing due warning about it. Coupled with incapacity is awful callousness. People born with silver spoons in their mouths and wallowing in luxuries simply cannot realize what the poor man is actually going through. It was the poor man mostly who fell victim to the Sikh’s kirpan in the East Panjab and now it is the poor man again who is paying this heavy toll in Pakistan, simply because people in power say they cannot cope with the work.
Well, if you cannot cope with the work, you have no right to be there. This is simple logic. If in a really democratic country, say England, half as many cattle had perished owing to the incapacity of Government, as human lives have been lost on this border of Pakistan for sheer lack of organizing capacity it would have shaken the very foundations of the ministry. But this is Pakistan! Thousands of human beings are dying by the roadside in biting cold, wind and rain and nobody cares.
For Heaven’s sake, let us not degrade the good name of Pakistan. Islam stands for the uplift and amelioration of the poor, the downtrodden, the under-dog of society. It recognises no privileged class. Pakistan, as an Islamic State, must always keep that high ideal before it. Islamic democracy lays it down as the very cornerstone of its polity that State offices are a public trust and any official, whether a Minister or a chaprasi who fails to do full justice to his duties betrays that trust. And this high tone of administration must come from above. It is men at the top who set the tune of the services. If they are imbued with high Islamic ideals, the rank and file simply follow suit. الناس علیٰ دین ملوکھم – is a truism as true to-day as of old.The Refugee problem and any other problems that we may have to confront cannot be solved satisfactory until and unless the whole outlook of administration in Pakistan Islamized. Those at the top, in particular, must be men steeped in Islamic ideology of plain living and high thinking and burning with the passion to make this Islamic State of Pakistan a model state, free from the ills and evils of statecraft which are the product of modern Godless civilization. If Pakistan is to attain a place in the sun our topmost administration must be imbued with the vision of Abu Bakr and Umar. Third-rate men with petty modernistic obsessions and petty standards wouldn´t do.
M.Y.K.
(The Light -Wednesday, December 24, 1947)
