Image Source: Economic Times |
Ode to a Nation in Chaos
by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif
[Editor's Choice]
The week before Pakistan’s 2024 general election, there was a sudden downpour of torrential rain in Karachi, completely unprecedented for February. Apocalyptic, it turned the roads into rivers, leaving cars and motorcycles half-submerged and pedestrians wading through knee-deep filthy water with their trouser legs rolled up.
As an omen, it felt a little on the nose. But it painted a timely picture of the state in which past governments had left Karachi, once the beating heart of the nation, now rotting and bedraggled after an expensive and never-ending drainage project left the streets dug up for months on end, flooding every time it rained.
This was my first election. When I was growing up in Karachi, I was too young to vote in the three elections that took place around the period of military rule. By the time I was eighteen, I had moved to London to study and was forced to sit out the next two elections—overseas Pakistanis can’t vote remotely. I’ve voted in three British general elections, along with the EU referendum, but this year I made a trip to Karachi and at thirty years old was going to be voting in my home country for the first time.
So perhaps a bit naively, I was brimming with excitement, and hopeful anticipation if not outright optimism. For the past year and a half, the country had existed in a state of limbo, under the leadership of a caretaker government following the ousting of the last Prime Minister in a vote of no confidence, while elections were delayed further and further. It felt like a turning point—for the country and for me. Since my father’s death, I’d felt increasingly disconnected from Pakistan, a silent witness to the spiralling turmoil across the political landscape, frustrated but helpless to do anything about it. Surely, I thought, participating in the democratic process was the way I could give back to the country that I couldn’t help feeling I had abandoned.
But it seemed I was the only one who felt that way. The mood across Karachi was one of cynical apathy. My childhood friends, who had remained in Pakistan or returned after university, were more interested in planning New Year’s Eve parties than in discussing politics. “When is the election again?” one of them asked, offhandedly, as if he’d forgotten a friend’s birthday. Even my mother, who had spent the last election canvassing door-to-door, seemed uncharacteristically subdued this time and muttered that she might abstain from voting.
In the weeks leading up to the elections, as Karachi shook itself off and recovered from the collective hangover of the wedding season that spans December and January and is affectionately known as Decemberistan, there was a quietness across the city. Any pre-election excitement on the streets was purely two-dimensional: posters of smiling electoral candidates plastered walls, telephone poles, and the backs of rickshaws, and party flags fluttered from telephone wires and balconies, all a variation of red, black, green, and white, making them impossible to distinguish between.
When I asked who they were voting for, my friends shrugged. So did my mother’s chatty neighbour, and the shopkeeper at the kiosk where I buy cigarettes, and my waxing lady, and the waiter serving me tea at my favourite roadside cafe. That shrug is a universal manifestation of the Pakistani attitude towards democracy: a mix of scepticism, irritation, and resignation. Democracy is the drunk uncle at your wedding who has to be escorted out, the guest who overstays their welcome and eventually becomes toxic.
The nature of government in Pakistan has always been cyclical and dynastic, changing hands between two ruling families, a revolving door where politicians shift allegiances with dizzying urgency and calculated strategy—interspersed with periods of military rule. No prime minister has ever finished their term in office. Stagnated—we were stagnated.
And it wasn’t only apathy, but fear that had been instilled into the usually hot-blooded Pakistani people. Specifically, it was fear of the shadowy Establishment—a sinister catch-all umbrella term that people feel is safer to use than directly referring to the military or other state agencies, one which brings to my mind the Empire from Star Wars. But it isn’t as cartoonishly villainous as it sounds, nor is it as overt as our previous military dictatorships have been—it’s more insidious than that, an oppression that hides behind the veil of democracy, wears it as a grotesque mask that everyone politely pretends not to notice.
This election felt symptomatic of that oppressive force, of all the issues that had plagued my country since its fragile, violent birth less than a century ago. As the events of election day unfolded, punctuated by the typical chaos that marks any processes in Pakistan, I could almost hear circus music playing in the background.
The streets were eerily empty, devoid of the frenzied Karachi traffic that is characterised by blaring horns and motorcycles narrowly dodging being clipped by a car’s bumper. But the silence ran deeper than that; it extended into the virtual world. The mobile and internet services had been down since morning, and would be off until after midnight—a precautionary measure by the government to prevent terrorist attacks; the Election Commission later blamed this for the delay in counting the votes. It also meant that a sense of general chaos and confusion ran through the city, as people, disconnected from each other and the wider world, were at a loss for what to do that day.
All across Karachi, people were realising that their polling station was halfway across the city rather than in their own constituency. Even within the same household, family members found they were registered to different polling stations. I could name at least a dozen people who didn’t vote because they couldn’t get to or didn’t want to make the trek to their polling station. Was it the usual disorganisation or an intentional form of weaponised incompetence designed to cut down the voter turnout?
Despite all that, I couldn’t suppress a giddy smile as the volunteer handing out ballot papers smeared a line of black ink across the back of my thumb, a tactic to keep people from voting twice. It was, I found, a more emotional experience than voting in the UK had ever been, as if doing this I was absolving myself slightly of any guilt of abandoning my homeland for better pastures, the way so many young people did when given the opportunity. It felt as though I’d earned the right to complain about Pakistan too, now that I had actually tried to do something to make it better.
My mother and I sat down to watch the results the way we would’ve watched a cricket match, with good-natured elation and buzzing anticipation — never mind that the Pakistani cricket team always disappoints, with spectacular and humiliating losses especially when we’re playing our arch-rivals India. Especially with the phones and internet switched off, our only outlet into the electoral process was the television screen, and the information it drip-fed us. I felt curiously isolated, as if the world outside Pakistan had fallen away, and time had slowed down into those hourly updates as the votes were counted. After the triumph of being directly involved in the process, we had been reduced to passive spectators.
There’s an Urdu idiom—daal mein kuch kala hai. Literally translated, it means there’s something black in the lentils. The closest English approximation is there’s something fishy going on. Between one hour and the next, candidates who were in a clear lead suddenly had less votes than they did previously and their opponents had been declared victors, in such a blatant case of rigging it was almost laughable. The chaos of election day had spilled over into the aftermath as the votes were counted, agonisingly slow, with no sign of a final tally in sight. Bizarrely, every major party simultaneously declared its victory while also accusing its opponents of rigging. The absurdity of it was almost satirical, and Pakistanis responded with their usual gallows humour, making jokes about it being less of a general election and more of a general’s election.
Three days later, we were still waiting for votes to be counted. By the time the results were almost finalised, it was clear that no party had enough of a majority to form a government. A coalition would have to be the only solution. Reports began to pour in of covert meetings between parties that claimed to hate each other, of army generals paying visits to party leaders, of candidates and their families being threatened as plainclothes policemen forced their way into polling stations. Insidiously, it felt as though we the voters were being kept in the dark, as if in the darkest underbelly of the nation shadowy figures were debating our fate while we were forever locked out of the room where it happens.
“I don’t know what we expected,” my mother grumbled as she finally gave up and went to bed, leaving me sitting alone in the dark in the glow of a muted television screen, the cat napping on my lap as I periodically checked my phone to see if the internet had been reconnected.
I felt a bit naive for being so optimistic about the elections, for expecting this to be some grand turning point in the narrative of my country, one where the shackles of oppression would dramatically be shaken off. Honestly, I blame my background as a student of literature and theatre. No, I blame my parents for naming me after a storyteller, the Arabian Nights’ Scheherazade. Stories have always been how I’ve made sense of the world, sifting life events into the category of tragedy or comedy to make them more palatable, seeking out patterns and symbols in the tapestry of my existence to try and predict what the next chapter will hold. It was why I saw the rain as an omen, saw the strange and chaotic events of this election, the bubbling frustration with this relentless cycle we were trapped in, as foreshadowing that change was on the horizon, that this election—my first election—would be a turning point.
The other reason for my desperate optimism came down to, as all things in my life seemed to, my father. My feelings about Pakistan, a mix of childish resentment and reverent love, have always been tied to my feelings about him. He had fought against oppression until literally his last breath, having spent several years in jail for resisting the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq in the eighties, and had been jailed again in the last year of his life for his criticism of the government. When a heart attack finally took his life, he was in the midst of investigating the forced disappearances of members of a banned political party, working with their families to seek out the missing when the police had turned a blind eye.
His legacy loomed over me like the longest shadow, a silent voice in my head constantly asking me what I was doing to live up to it, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father demanding I take action. Pakistani politics has always felt, to me, unavoidably Shakespearean, characterised by backstabbing and tragic falls from power. The theatre analogy running through my head was only amplified by the feeling that the people, the supposed movers and shakers of democracy, are nothing more than passive observers, akin to a theatre audience.
It was in this mindset that I convinced my mother that we should go to one of the many protests breaking out around Karachi, spearheaded by different parties, gathering momentum as more and more candidates challenged the election results, some of them going to the Supreme Court with accusations of rigging. The apathy of the last few weeks had been eroded by outrage and had erupted into fury. My friends, who last week had been so flippant, were raging about the outcome. The news channels, which up until now had been careful not to openly criticise the Establishment, were dropping acerbic, sarcastic remarks as they analysed the results. It was as if a dam had burst. Apathy had been bludgeoned to death and tossed in a shallow grave. Cynicism gave way to righteous fury.
My mother’s reluctance to go surprised me. Her fearlessness rivalled even that of my father’s. A journalist, she had remained fiercely loyal to my father during his incarceration, fighting the military oppression from the side-lines, a warrior in her own right. Perhaps she had shed the recklessness of her youth, perhaps the events of the past few days had made her cynical, or perhaps her protective maternal instincts trumped any sense of patriotic outrage. That didn’t stop her from flashing a smile and raising her fingers in a victory salute as I took her photo with the protest in the background—invigorated, as I was, as we all were.
The protest was in the heart of Saddar, Karachi’s old town, characterised by sandstone colonial buildings and sprawling, maze-like bazaars where you can buy anything from clothes to jewellery to henna. The road in front of the Election Commission’s headquarters filled up steadily with an eclectic crowd from a dizzying array of backgrounds: working class and middle-class; young men perched on motorbikes with PTI flags jutting from the handlebars; women who were covered up and women who wore jeans; families with young children. There was an old woman being pushed in a wheelchair and an American woman who looked out of her depth but exhilarated. It was as though Karachi had temporarily broken free of the shackles that divided and fragmented it, united instead by its rage.
But despite that, another side of the city emerged on the fringes of the protest: Karachi’s commerce nudged its way onto the stage, unfettered by the commotion. Motorcycles, fruit carts, and one harassed-looking ice cream truck squeezed through the protest to get to the market in a side street, too preoccupied with their own worries to care whether their democratic rights had been violated. Others took advantage of the business opportunity the crowd presented: a roadside restaurant behind me was trying to coax hungry protestors to their tables, and a fruit vendor was selling oranges to those standing on the sidelines. Two sides of the nation lay exposed before us: those who cared about oppression, and those who couldn’t afford to care. For the average Pakistani, the question of who wears the crown is less of a concern than the cost of living crisis, the shortage of gas, electricity, and water, the crumbling infrastructure, and the abject poverty in which a vast majority of the country lives. Theirs was a quieter battle, one fought day to day, invisible to the rest of us.
The protest had the atmosphere of a festival, and there was an electric sort of energy in the air. Music blared from speakers, playing political anthems written for the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party, whose leader, Imran Khan, currently sat in jail, an exiled king around whom his followers had built a cult following that almost bordered on the religious. Music has always been an intrinsic part of Pakistani protest movements. The songs and slogans that filled the street all revolved around a single word—tabdeeli, meaning change, the mantra that had defined Khan’s campaign. Change was the elusive white stag that we Pakistanis chased, an invisible prophet who could deliver us from the stagnation we’d found ourselves in.
It felt like a scene from a story—a tired people, blinking the slumber from their eyes, coming together in triumph to howl their defiance against the shadows.
The atmosphere, and the energy buzzing through it, reminded me of the pro-Palestine marches I’d attended in London over the last few months. Just as the Pakistani government desperately tried to shut down the protests with mass arrests and police forces eagerly looking for any excuse to incite violence, the UK government had labelled the pro-Palestine protests as hate marches, positioning them as a threat to the security of the UK. As I’d crossed Vauxhall Bridge over the gleaming Thames, pressed in from all sides by a crowd of staggering numbers, all chanting from the river to the sea, I’d felt a collective sense of helpless rage rippling through the protestors, being channelled towards a relentless urge to do something, anything.
But despite that, by the time I returned to London, the protests had petered off into a meek silence, and a coalition government had been set up, composed of the same old faces. The shadow of the military loomed behind them, a silent warning not to distress the status quo. It felt as though we were back to square one. Like our cricket team, which plays like a dream and then at the last minute fumbles and drops the ball, often literally, Pakistan’s tussle against oppression seems to inch us ever so close to where we need to be, before abruptly ricocheting two steps backward. It feels as though democracy has stagnated here, or as though it just doesn’t work in a country like Pakistan. No wonder the people are tired. You can only watch history repeat itself so many times before you grow bored and change the channel.
But sitting in London, an ocean away from my country, with the benefit and privilege of retrospect and distance, I felt less like I had a right to criticise, even with the smear of black ink still on my thumbnail, which I hadn’t been able to bear scrubbing away fully. I returned to London with the same feeling of guilt that always follows me as I leave the home of my birth for the one of my choice. It’s a guilt all first-generation immigrants are familiar with, that with each departure we are chipping away at more and more pieces of our homeland, and replacing it with something foreign-made. There will come a day, in about seven years, when I will have lived in the UK for longer than I lived in Pakistan.
It is also the sense that I have somehow abandoned my country in its time of need. I’m aware what an irrational sentiment this is—as if I, armed with nothing but my degree in literature and skill with the written word and acerbic wit, am the key to battling oppression in Pakistan. But that feeling is always there, a silent siren song beckoning me to return, even if it’s just so I can be a first-hand eyewitness to the unravelling of my homeland and the suffering of its people.
It’s also why it feels almost hypocritical to sit in my comfortable South London flat and yap about Everything That’s Wrong With Pakistan. Sometimes I feel like a tourist dipping her toe in a foreign country and wrinkling my nose at the cuisine and the hygiene and the way the trains don’t come on time. But it’s an inherent and inevitable hypocrisy that I’ve noticed in my fellow Pakistanis, even those still on the home front, an inability to look inwards with the same critical foresight with which they look outwards.
Since the war in Gaza broke out last year, Pakistanis have been vocal in calling out the genocide being carried out by Israel, but somehow, it’s all too easy to turn a blind eye to the oppression being carried out within our borders. Minority groups like Shias and Ahmedis are killed or have their mosques burned down by members of the Sunni majority. Non-Muslims and Muslims alike are murdered by lynch mobs under the pretext of blasphemy. Afghan refugees, who fled Taliban rule and made Pakistan their home, are rounded up and deported. Baloch freedom fighters are picked up and made to disappear by state agencies. The list goes on—and the blame doesn’t lie solely on the shadowy, faceless Establishment, but on a deep-seated hatred and mistrust of anything Other that runs through the fabric of Pakistani society.
Pakistan as a nation, perhaps due to leftover trauma from its colonial past, has always grappled with an anxiety about external influences impeding our sovereignty—whether it’s moral panic about Western mores seeping into our culture, or foreign governments, specifically the USA, manipulating our politics. It’s why, collectively, we always see the true enemy, the true oppressor, as being a disease that invades from the outside, rather than something that festers within. It’s easier to blame an enemy nation or even a faceless government/military hive mind, than to look at the cracks in our society that allow this kind of oppression to run free.
As I write this, the UK’s own general election is only days away. It will be an entirely different affair to what I experienced back in February—I’ll cross the street to the polling station opposite my flat, and watch the results rolling in over pizza and beers with my friends, strong in the conviction that by the next morning we would have a government. Yet I can’t help but see eerie parallels between the two elections I’ll have voted in this year. Like Pakistan, the UK is buzzing with a deep-seated anxiety, an ill-willed resentment towards the current government, and a thirst for change that’s mixed with scepticism about what the alternative might offer. There is an anxiety about external influences destabilising the country, in this case manifesting in the form of vicious anti-immigration sentiments and rampant far-right xenophobia.
More worryingly, I see the same sense of resentful, resigned apathy brewing throughout London as I saw in Karachi. Most people I know are voting Labour more to avoid another Conservative government than out of any sense of party loyalty. There is less of a focus on ideology, and more a desperate push towards change, towards the slim possibility of a better alternative. People are too preoccupied with immediate concerns about the cost of living crisis and the housing crisis to think about the bigger picture. And while I can’t blame them, or myself, for this, it feels like we’re shoving oppression and injustice under the rug, and with that any hope of combating them.
In the stories, the narrative we’ve always been taught about fighting oppression is that of the underdog defeating a powerful, faceless evil, often against all odds or at the eleventh hour, whether it’s David beating Goliath or Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star. It’s a comforting narrative, one that drives anti-oppression movements around the world. There’s a power in these sorts of stories, just as there’s a power in the songs and chants that go hand in hand with protests and marches, because they appeal to some intrinsic, primal need in all of us to seek meaning in chaos. They allow us to find symbols to rally behind and to identify patterns and omens that are reassuring in their familiarity and predictability, and which give us hope.
But at the same time, I’m not convinced of the viability of this narrative. In the real world, the Good Guys and Bad Guys are not so clear cut, and the players of either side, whatever these sides may be, are usually both of the faceless variety: powerful politicians, military and other institutions, corporations. We, the individuals, are usually locked out of the room where it happens, only catching snippets of a larger story that’s being written and manipulated without our knowledge. It’s this inherent disadvantage that makes fighting oppression feel like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill.
As I write this, I find myself tipping dangerously towards apathy. And apathy, I think, is oppression’s greatest ally. In many ways it’s a coping mechanism, a defence against anger and fear that can become unbearable and crippling. But it’s also a privilege to be able to be apathetic in the first place, and apathy, that conniving double agent, pushes us further and further away from action, and from any hope of change, of tabdeeli.
It’s why I hold on so tightly to my guilt about Pakistan and my father, painful as it is, because at least it means I feel something. For my country, broken and bruised and battered as it is, but beloved all the same.
Shehrazade Zafar-Arif |
Shehrazade Zafar-Arif grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, the daughter of a politician and a journalist, before moving to London to study English Literature and Shakespeare Studies. Her writing is influenced by the two cities she calls home, by her experiences as an immigrant, and by her love of theatre. Her short stories have been published in Peatsmoke Journal, Untitled: Voices, FeelsZine, FEED Lit Mag, and the Grimm Retold anthology (forthcoming). She is an editorial assistant for CRAFT Magazine and also writes for Shakespeare Bulletin, Crayon Magazine, the Croydonist, and the Japan Society Review. She is on Twitter as @ShehrazadeZafar.