The Bangladesh counterfactual convicts us on our export performance; but the record wants precision, not sackcloth – and the sentence, it turns out, is still ours to write.
Passing power repeatedly between genuine adversaries is rare among the large Muslim states: Indonesia has managed it since 1998; Nigeria, raggedly, since 1999; Egypt’s single transfer was reversed within a year; Bangladesh’s journey is full of reversals of its own.
Pakistan’s record is imperfect. Constitutional rule has been interrupted more than once, but the frame beneath is obstinately durable: four transfers between rival parties since 2008, and the settlement of 1973, the only document every party in our history has jointly signed – suspended at times, rewritten at times, never extinguished, the country returning to it like a joint family to an old house. A dozen quarrelling parties, an independent bar, a press that will not be quiet: we do not value the din, never having spent a day in the silence – and one glance at a neighbourhood where forming a party is a crime, candidates pass a clerical sieve and the schoolhouse door is barred to girls, cures that deafness.
Even the federation survives an honest look. Our poorest province stands at 63 per cent of our richest – a real gap, a culpable one, but the gap of one country. India’s Bihar stands at 18 per cent of Karnataka: Somalia folded inside the so-called shining India; distance between federating units so wide that it is hardly one country.
The economic history, too, has been narrated not so honestly. For 35 of the 48 years between 1960 and 2008, Pakistani income per head exceeded India’s; the lead changed hands only in 2009 – the decade we became the battlefield of a war we did not choose, at a whopping cost of 30,000 lives and $150 billion. And 1971 must not be smuggled past the auditors: nemo iudex in causa sua – we sat as judges in our brothers’ case and turned party to it. But read the entry accurately: Bengal revolted not against Muslim-majority statehood but against 1947’s most difficult clause – two wings, a thousand miles apart, one capital. It chose to become a second Muslim-majority state, not a province of anyone’s Akhand Bharat. The founding argument was not refuted in 1971; it was reorganised – and the Oxus-to-Salween dreamers now find two walls across their dream road.
One entry remains, and it outweighs the rest of the debit column. Twelve per cent – what this state collects of what its economy produces, and it has collected below that level for a generation: a settled bargain every administration inherited and left undisturbed. A recent surge of 1.5 percentage points is an aberration, not a norm. A state that cannot take twelve rupees from a hundred cannot school its children, police its cities, defend its currency or sidestep its standing commitment to the world’s lenders. Nor are the arrears the federation’s alone: the provinces, assigned some of the richest untapped bases – agricultural income, urban property, services – collect barely one per cent of GDP between all four. A landlord’s harvest and a city plot, the two oldest forms of wealth in this society, remain the two least taxed: the federation borrows abroad what the country declines to collect at home.
From that refusal the rest follows. Exports have stood at near $30 billion for a decade while Bangladesh’s tripled and Vietnam’s passed $300 billion – no act of God, but the yield of an industrial policy that issued protections that never expire, priced concessions by fiat and verified rents by the recipient’s own signature: a system rewarding the talent for obtaining a subsidy over the talent for selling a product. The New Tariff Policy is a welcome departure from policy capture, but too recent to bear fruit yet.
The schools enrol but do not teach and half of our ten-year-olds cannot read a sentence written for their age. The female half of the nation stands largely outside the workforce: the prosperity game played with one hand tied behind our back, and we tied the knot ourselves. And beneath everything, the quietest number and the loudest: four in ten of our children are stunted; bodies and minds discounted by hunger before their fifth birthday, a write-down no reform can reverse. These are not history’s wounds. History set no tax rate, exempted no harvest, sent no child to bed unfed. These are the standing decisions of the living – and what the living have decided, the living can revise.
Yet the honesty that records the arrears must record the estate; the prosperity game is a match in progress, not a match lost. The state that in 1947 could not furnish its offices with stationery now exports fighter aircraft; a nation where one in six could read now reads above 60 per cent; life expectancy has climbed from 32 to nearly 68; IT exports near $4 billion. The girl from Swat took a bullet, kept her pen, and carried home a Nobel at 17. The boy from Hangu bought several hundred young lives with the only one he had. A man with a begging bowl built the largest volunteer ambulance service on earth. None inherited money or influence; all were grown in this soil. Such a soil is not barren – only under-cultivated, and the cure is in our own dispensary.
Two things are true at once, and a temperament that owns only a dirge or an anthem must learn to hold both. We were right in 1940 – 79 years of testing against a living control group, on evidence Indian in origin and compounding annually. But everything turns on the distinction the mourners refuse to draw: between a game lost and a game still in play. Nations that lose the survival game never sit at prosperity’s table; we paid that entry fee in full. Bangladesh’s rise is not our humiliation but our existence proof; everything we lack can be built from endowments no better than our own. The seed that comes through the snow intact is not a failed harvest. It is a harvest waiting for spring.
The founding argument, meanwhile, is settled. Seventy-nine years is long enough to litigate one’s own birth. What remains is a work order, short and known by heart: revenue from 12 to 18; exports doubled; every girl in school, and every child’s first thousand days beyond the reach of hunger. None of it requires a miracle; all of it has been done, within living memory, by neighbours who began with less. A country that refused to be erased by enemies will not be defeated by its own governance code. We have not won the prosperity game but we are still at the table, the survival stakes are banked and the next hand is ours to play. The case for mourning is closed. The case for building is open. And a people who once declined to disappear can hardly, now, decline to build. There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Succeed we shall.
Concluded
The writer is a senior bureaucrat based in Islamabad.
