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DAWN MAGAZINE Sunday, February 6, 2000
BOOKREVIEWBOOKREVIEW
A book the rulers must read
BY HUMAIR ISHTIAQ
JINNAH BETRAYED, by A.B.S. Jafri. Published by Royal Book Company, Karachi. 101pp. Rs295.
T O say that we have abused the great opportunity we had in the shape of Pakistan to rise as a self-respecting nation is but to say the obvious. Many a pen has taken up the task to shed light on when, why and how things went wrong in our che quered history. Just a few titles that have hit the book-stands in recent times are enough to hint at the magnitude of the problem. It started with Lawrence Zering’s Is Pakistan a Failed State, and was soon followed by titles like A Dream Gone Sour (Roedad Khan), The Barren Years (Mazhar Ali Khan), and The Shattered Dream (Ghulam Kibria). In fact, one finds a cer-tain level of social and political cynicism creep ing in, but this cynicism is certainly not mis placed. Things really have been that wrong. Every few years, senior and seasoned journalist A.B.S. Jafri adds his voice to this chorus which, it seems, is being unfortunately played before a deaf audience.
Jafri’s latest offering, Jinnah Betrayed is a col-lection of short pieces about happenings during the last one year or so. The political situation, indeed the situation on all national fronts, being what it has been in the last few years, Jafri natu rally has a lot to say on a lot of things. That he has successfully avoided being repetitive is some achievement in itself. This he has done by bring-ing into play fresh and far-from-mundane views on matters of national import. For instance, we have all heard and talked about how fair the 1970 elections were. Indeed, they are still referred to as the country’s only fair elections during the course of its existence as an indepen dent entity. Jafri gives the reader some food for thought by discussing the 1970 episode from an interesting angle. He writes: “… It was a fair elec-tion by our standards. Why it was fair was only because General Yahya had no time or inclina tion to be bothered about anything. He was just too easy going to have bothered to doctor the election.” Sounds interesting and, perhaps, close to reality as well!
The cord which binds together the forty odd short pieces in the book, as the title suggests, is the writer’s lament over our continued journey away from the ideals of the Father of the Nation. He has taken Jinnah’s famed August 11, 1947, address to the Constituent Assembly…
Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims… as what should have been the cornerstone of government poli-cies, and has shown us how far away we have already moved from those ideals. “It is a shatter ing irony of Pakistan that the state founded by an uncompromising advocate of parliamentary democracy was to see the foundation institutions of democratic polity systematically uprooted With all this monumental wreck and the ruin of the last shred of Jinnah’s legacy, we pretend to be following in the footprints of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. We go into sham raptures once a year when his birthday turns round every December 25,” he writes in his typically powerful depiction of reality.
Having set October 7, 1958, as the date when the nation began to live in “disgracefully brazen betrayal of the founder”, the writer has discussed one after the other the various segments of our national life, showing how did the rot set in. It goes to the credit of Jafri that he has treated the characters who found themselves at the helm from time to time in an even-handed manner. If he has called Gen Ziaul Haq “the embodiment of total negation of all the values that Jinnah cher-ished and Islam enjoins”, he has been equally truthful when he says: “Our tragedy deepens when it is realized that the restoration of ‘democ racy’ after the demise of dictator Ziaul Haq has brought only more ignominy than ever before.”
At another place, while talking about the pathological hypocrisy that our self-styled lead-ers have practised over the years, Jafri writes: “Whatever we have by way of politics is a process that unfailingly throws up persons who are blithely wallowing in moral decay, and enjoying it.” Throughout the book, Jafri has shown this impressive ability to come precariously close to reality. And this keeps the reader engrossed.
Describing the book as “an album of snapshots of our corrupt, debt-ridden and disreputable exis-tence today”, the writer has conceded that the intention is “not so much to surprise the reader, as to add to the pervasive melancholy”. As such, while a general reader may simply enjoy Jafri’s excruciatingly frank discussion of recent happen-ings, the book may actually benefit those parad-ing the corridors of power these days. If they don’t set out to do what needs to be done today, history’s verdict against them may not be much different to the one that A.B.S. Jafri has passed against their predecessors.