There is a son who stands in his father’s house, pointing out every crack to the neighbours. The roof leaks, he announces. The foundations are rotting. The walls are hollow. Come, look, see how worthless this inheritance is. He does not want the house repaired.
He does not want it demolished. He wants it weak, wounded and his. Because a strong house would not need him. A proud house would not hear him. Only a broken house makes his shadow seem tall. He does not hate the house because it has failed him. He needs it to fail, because its failure is the only throne from which he can speak.
The son no longer sleeps under that roof. He has crossed oceans, settled in lands that do not know his father’s name. And yet every morning he wakes and scours the walls for new wounds to celebrate. One can leave the house and still wish it well. One can disagree with its current tenants and still hope the roof holds. One can be absent from its rooms and still refuse to celebrate when the walls tremble. You can carry pain from that house, carry grievance, carry scars. But you do not have to sell tickets to its suffering.
I am a child of two worlds. I was born in America; Pakistan is the land of my ancestors, my heritage, my faith. This presents its own peculiar dilemmas when conflicts of interest arise, as they inevitably do. I cherish both the country that raised me and the country that runs through my blood. I carry two flags, and I consider that a privilege and a blessing. I do not state this to claim virtue, but merely to acknowledge my biases before I offer my perspective.
Distance, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. For some of us, I know this to be true. For others, it has only made the betrayal easier, a shield behind which shame cannot reach them. I have watched these sons multiply across our screens and I find myself wrestling with a question that refuses to resolve itself and lingers long after the screen goes dark.
I can understand opposition. Politics is a blood sport. It has always been thus. Reasonable people can look at the same leader and see either deliverance or disaster and both can argue in good faith. I can understand resentment. When power has crushed your hopes, when a politician’s hand has reached into the treasury of your dreams, when a system’s machinery has ground what you held dear to dust, yes, I understand the heart grown bitter, the voice rendered harsh, the sleepless nights spent cataloguing grievances.
I can even understand hatred. It is not an emotion I recommend, but I recognise its origins. To hate a man, you believe has wronged you, to hate a system you feel has betrayed you: this, too, belongs to the human experience. I will not pretend otherwise.
But what I cannot understand, what escapes me entirely, what leaves me questioning whether I have fundamentally misunderstood the species to which I belong, is how that hatred degenerates into something perverse. How does opposition to a party transform into gleeful trafficking in every slander against your homeland? How does resentment mutate into what can only be described as a lust for national catastrophe?
Watch them, these merchants of despair. When misinformation surfaces, there is no pause for verification. No instinct towards scepticism. No moment of surely this cannot be true. There is only the frantic rush to spread the venom before the truth can catch up. And when the lie is exposed, as lies eventually are? Silence. No correction. No contrition. Just the quiet pivot to the next fabrication, and the next, in an endless parade of calumny.
Ask yourself: when was the last time these voices shared good news about Pakistan without immediately drowning it in qualification? When did they last allow a national achievement to stand for even an hour without explaining why it doesn’t count, why it’s actually a failure, why you’re naive for feeling pride? When did they last permit themselves, or you, a single moment of uncomplicated hope?
Let me be clear, for clarity is owed even to those who profit from confusion: criticism is not betrayal. Demanding accountability is not sedition. Marching against injustice is not treason. God knows we desperately need more souls who risk something real for something true. I am not speaking of dissent. I am speaking of those who no longer want the house repaired, who want it condemned so they can stand in the rubble and say I told you so. I am speaking of those who have made a religion of their resentment and a career of their country’s pain. The only Pakistan they can tolerate is a Pakistan on its knees. Their quarrel is no longer with a party or an institution or a government. Their quarrel is with Pakistan itself. And that is a war they can only win by losing everything they are.
For here is the irony, inescapable: these peddlers of national defamation. Their platforms, their audiences, their relevance, their very livelihoods, all spring from the identity they work so tirelessly to degrade. They are not citizens of some alternate nation, some ideological utopia floating in the digital clouds. Remove Pakistan from their biography, and what remains? A voice without a stage. An identity without a homeland to commodify. A man shouting into a void that has never heard his name and never will.
One can oppose a government and still love a nation. One can despise a leader and still hope for a people. One can be disappointed in politics and still refuse to surrender one’s patrimony to despair. There are other sons and daughters who have suffered far more, lost far greater, grieved far deeper. But something in them refused to let their wounds become the whole of their identity. They did not mistake their suffering for wisdom, nor their anger for virtue. They understood that Pakistan, this maddening, magnificent, broken, beautiful country, is still worth more than any leader’s fortunes or any party’s fate. That the house which has hurt them is still the house where their mother sang them to sleep. They chose to carry their pain without building careers from the rubble of collective hope.
They understood what the ambitious never learn: that this country belongs to its people, not to those who would rule it or to those who cannot. They saw what rage makes blind, that every street set ablaze, every institution torn down, every day of chaos declared, comes at a cost paid by those who can least bear it. They never forgot: two hundred and forty million stories live within these borders. These people are not props in anyone’s political theatre. Their hopes are not collateral damage in someone else’s war against a government. This country is not anyone’s to burn because they cannot rule it.
The political winds will shift. They always do. The names in power will change. The grievances of today will become the footnotes of tomorrow. But I think often about what history will make of this moment. Not the history written by partisans, which is always contested, but the quieter history, the one written in the memories of those who bore witness, who will not forget.
Some of us will remember the screenshots. We will remember the lies shared with glee. We will remember the homeland’s misfortunes celebrated like festival days, the desperate hunger for catastrophe that breathed life into every rumour, drove every click. We will remember those who rooted for their country’s ruin because they would not abide its redemption under a leader they despised. We will remember that when the house was on fire, they were the ones holding the matches and the gasoline.
The writer is an entrepreneur living in the United States and the United Kingdom. He can be reached at: [email protected]
