If a Mughal Rip Van Winkle was to wake up in Pakistan today, he would not feel out of place. There would be much he would recognise.

He would find himself in a country consisting of satrapies – four provinces and the fifth, the Pakistan Army. Each owes its allegiance to a different war-lord – Punjab to the PML-N, Sindh to PPP and MQM, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the PTI, and so on. Each offers only nominal allegiance to a tinsel president. Each is governed by impulse, not intuition, by reaction, not reason.

A civilian government has recurring nightmares about its army, while the army dreams occasionally about being a king-maker again. The navy – as in Mughal times – is accorded a nominal role in the state’s security, for since the time of Muhammad bin Qasim, no one ever expects an invasion by sea. The air force (a post-Mughal invention) passed judgment on itself during the night of 2 May 2011, when while the president of the United States and his aides in Washington watched live the attack by US SEALs on Abbottabad, our costly F-16s remained dormant and unresponsive.

That Mughal Rip Van Winkle would not be surprised to learn that the military attack on Miramshah on 9 July resulted in the escape of the targeted quarry of militant terrorists. All that was left (it was reported) in a town ‘inhibited by more than 100,000 people’ was nothing more dangerous than ‘a solitary donkey’, understandably oblivious that it was grazing in a war-zone.

That time-traveller would notice with satisfaction how we have inherited a strain of Mughal arrogance, the pompous insularity that made the emperor Jahangir return a European map of the world as ‘incorrect’ because it showed his empire as too small in relation to the rest of the world.  

He would have enjoyed our Pakistani equivalent of the Mughal sport of elephant fighting, in which two mammoths collide head-on, each intent on emerging battered but supreme as the Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board.

He would not have been surprised to see how we - a nation that popularised and excelled at hockey - should not have qualified for the recent Hockey World Cup in The Hague. Or how we - a nation that manufactures most of the footballs kicked about during the Football World Cup in Brazil - should not be able to muster a respectable soccer team.  Or how our national airline which taught others to fly is itself grounded, like an ageing albatross.

He would have been gratified to see in the selection of our leadership we have maintained the Mughal concept of primogeniture and kinship. The eldest is deemed the fittest, for isn’t blood thicker than grey matter?

This comparison between the Mughals and today’s rulers is droll, even laughable, had it not been so cuttingly appropriate. So much so, that we might as well turn the clock back and like Mughals without electricity, fan ourselves into somnolence, or better still, go into a hundred-year sleep and wake up after a century to find a new, improved world.

Instead, we have to reconcile ourselves to the reality that there is a perceptible vacuum in governance. States function on the same principle that whales keep afloat; if they do not keep swimming, they would sink and drown. Every public expects its government to keep moving, to propel its country forward, and occasionally to take the country into confidence. Lately, one suspects our government has concealed more than it revealed.  

For example, while the Minister for Water and Power Mian Asif shed liquefied natural tears over power shortages, he has not thought fit to explain to the Pakistani public an intriguing proposal embedded in the Indian Budget 2014-15.  It was reported in India that its Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has exempted liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from customs duty (presently 5%) if it is meant for onward sale to a neighbouring nation. According to Indian media, ‘this will set the stage for the state-run Gail India Ltd, which plans to build a Rs 500-crore pipeline to export five million units per day of regassified-LNG to Pakistan, to start work on the ground.’ The MD of Gail Mr B. Tripathi went further: ‘Broad parameters have been agreed to and a contract will also be signed shortly between the two sides after which it will take one year to build it.’

And what happened to the much-vaunted Iran-Pakistan-India Rs 10,000 crore pipeline? The disingenuous response from India is that its ‘security experts felt that being dependent on gas coming via Pakistan could compromise India’s energy security.’

Would it be too much to ask why there was no mention, no counterpart reflection of this Indian pipeline in Pakistan’s Budget 2014-15? Or has the Mughal bell of justice lost its ringer?

(c) F.S. AIJAZUDDIN

[DAWN, 17 JULY 2014]