Our fellow human beings, the Japanese, have an almost superhuman sense of shame. They cannot bear to live with it. When overcome with shame, they commit hara-kiri. That is the Japanese for suicide as an act to redeem one's honour from shame. Suppose for a moment, we in Pakistan miraculously develop the same kind of intense sense of honour and self-esteem and seek redemption for our wrongdoing by suicide. what will Pakistan look and feel like? How many of our notables and 'nobles' will have said good bye to their sweet life out of a sense of unendurable shame?

Our Islamic republic would become unrecognizable. Undoubtedly, it is a horrendous thought. However, it carries an illusion of some relief. The second most corrupt nation (by the standards of Transparency International) will be able to redeem its lost jewels _ respectability, honour and self-esteem.

What makes one so awfully uncomfortable is that, not to speak of feeling ashamed, not many appear to be even slightly uncomfortable. Bernard Shaw made one of his characters say that he felt unhappy when he found people happy. All GBS meant to say was simply that with so much of wrong doings, so much of ugliness, injustice, crime, cruelty and pain around, how can anyone feel really and truly happy. the kind of brutalized environment in which we not live offers nothing but unrelieved melancholy. 

One can perhaps secretly bear shame if assured that nobody knows about the misdemeanour committed. The face is not irretrievably lost. But in Pakistan that is hardly the case. There is no secret about those who have been ruling over this country, exercising state authority in countless forms: as managers of co-operative societies, as political operators in one capacity or another.

Then we have those who are, or have been, near kin of those who are now wielding, or have wielded, state power, from political platforms, religious pulpits or the sanctums of sovereign state authority. Their records, too, are also a fairly open book in front of the public eye.

None of those who ought to be ashamed of their conduct are nameless or faceless people, hibernating outside the area of public knowledge. This nation is aware of who have been involved in crass misdeeds amounting to unmitigated crimes of robbery, loot, misappropriation, theft and plunder of the wealth and resources belonging to the people and the state. People are also aware fairly precisely of the political crimes committed in this country and who committed them, when and how.

Among these crimes one must include repeated subversion of the constitution, sabotage of the state apparatus, violation of fundamental rights of the people and vandalization of lawfully established and popularly cherished institutions, not excluding the judiciary at the highest level.

One must also assume that those who have been guilty of these misdeeds against the state, against the people and against the honour and soul of this nation, are also quite clearly conscious of the fact that there is nothing secret about their felonies _ not any more. These gentlemen (with perhaps a sprinkling of ladies) know in their hearts that their conduct has injured this nation and state where it hurts most agonizingly. They also fully know that the people know all about the unforgivable wrongdoing in high places that have brought Pakistan to this pass.

The disrepute of being rated among the most corrupt and most heavily debt-ridden nations in the world is only part of our shame. Not necessarily the most hurting part either. This shame can be redeemed. But some other injuries may now be beyond remedy or repair.

From the first unconstitutional regime that descended upon us in the fall of 1958 we got the infection of legalized and institutionalized corruption in the management of the state. In the name of 'capital formation' corruption was not only condoned, it was pursued and encouraged as state policy. The nation knows the names and faces of those who flourished in that infected ambience. They are now billionaires. It is also typical of Pakistan's degeneration that to be a billionaire is to be politically powerful _ and vice versa. politics is directly convertible into money, money into political power. Nothing else matters.

Few countries in the world will have such a big brood of one-generation billionaires. What began as 'capital formation' under the first autocratic regime, became the established political faith under the longest ruling dictator. He produced more billionaires than any other previous regime, or any since. These billionaires, reared in the incubators of cynically autocratic governments, are now automatically the source and fountain of unbridled state power. They enjoy almost complete immunity from the imperatives of law and morality. They are the scourge of this nation _ also its rulers.

As a nation we ought to have a very lacerated conscience. We have seen usurpers play the pope in this country. Field Marshal Ayub Khan dismissed 303 high-level civil servants for all manners of alleged wrongdoing and corruption. The general who later deposed the field marshal, hurled into the dustbin 303 senior government officials in the name of purification of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto went several leagues forward in the process of cleansing the government apparatus in He dismissed hundreds of civil servants and then proceeded to invent his own system of recruitment to services by what was called the 'lateral entry'.

All these puritanical labours were in aid of ridding the country of the corrupt and dishonest. General Ziaul Haq employed Islam to 'cleanse' this land of the pure. How pure is our Islamic republic today you know.

This recapitulation of our brief history, albeit in bits and pieces, was perhaps necessary to identify the origins of our shame and near disintegration of the political and moral fabric of this unconscionably mistreated nation. It is a fallacy to assume that only money-related wrongdoing is corruption. In our degenerate culture of today, corruption takes a hundred forms.

How would you define inducting known black guards into the ranks of the police? Or disclosing the contents of examination question papers to the children of the politically influential? Or handing out juicy foreign assignments to utterly undeserving government servants in gross violation of service rules? Or doling out cushy appointments to utterly useless careerists? Or mounting menacing public demonstration to intimidate lawmakers and higher court judges? Or permitting ruffians to oppress helpless citizens belonging to minority communities? Or planting political moles in sensitive public services and independent professions, particularly journalism?

This is not a complete list of misdemeanours that have come to be the rule in the corridors of state authority. It is not possible to encompass the uncontainable ingenuity of the corrupt and the cruel. In our country shooting down people in known places of worship is becoming commonplace. So is the practice of shooting down people in what are labelled as 'encounters' with the police. Persons die in police custody in circumstances that have ceased to have any mystery. The killers are seldom apprehended. This is only a very short string of flashes from our gory saga.

One is left speechless when told a man has now been arrested who has been on a killing spree for a number of years in the same city. Nobody is impelled to ask where the police were, or what they were doing when that self-confessed ogre was blithely committing his first, his second, third, sixth, or tenth or twelfth murder? How, or for what consideration, was the compulsive killer left free for years to go on killing at will in the same city?

Thanks to years of experience, the public now has all the answers to all these questions, and more. The public now knows fully well who's who. There is no secret about who have been the main characters behind the operations that have left all nationalized commercial banks (that is banks under complete control of so many governments since the late 1970s) bankrupt to the bone. There is no secret about who have plundered all, or nearly all, cooperative societies virtually to extinction.

Billions of rupees deposited by small savers have gone into the pockets of the powerful among politicians and their proteges among the bureaucrats. According to one reliable source, those who have plundered the banks in a big way number some 800 plus. Their names are known. But they remain in possession of their booty. They have no shame; the state no spine.

The plundering partners have raked in all the wealth. They now have more than enough to buy safety from law. Immunity from the application of law is on open sale. The plunderers have the world at their feet; the plundered have no one to turn to, nowhere to go _ except to what is their veritable hell on earth.

Pakistan's wealth transferred to foreign banks and other places for safe keeping is an open book. Newspapers in foreign countries, notably the United Kingdom and the United States, have been frequently publishing stories with bizarre details. The former prime minister's real estate properties and bank accounts have been subject of weird newspaper reports. Some cases have reached prosecution stage in some foreign countries. Lately the sitting prime minister has been named in some reports about properties acquired, held and enjoyed abroad. Both have promised to sue the offending newspapers. Promises in today's Pakistan have a tendency to be forgotten.

Foreign travels of prime ministers in Pakistan invariably generate a spate of tales. These also focus on the credentials of fellow travellers, so to speak. The preceding prime minister travelled to the United States in a jumbo jet. The present PM took a relatively modest aircraft. But both have generated comment which would be a torment to anyone with a conscience. A former head of this Islamic state travelled in regal style to a foreign country to be present at a ceremony at a college where his son was studying. All the pomp and fun at public expense. There was no suggestion of any troubled conscience in any quarter. nor any trace of remorse. Water doesn't seep beneath Teflon surface.

Every few months one hears about filing of statements of assets. Government officials have been told to record and reveal their assets. This is supposed to be done year after year, since at least 1995. Leaders of major political parties have been promising that their candidates will be required to make public statements of their assets along with their nomination papers, when seeking election.

What happens to these statements of assets is not known to the public. Are these ever scrutinized by any responsible authority or institution? Are themselves models of probity and rectitude? Did the former prime minister ever file a statement of her assets? Has the incumbent premier done anything of the kind? No answer.

How much of money has gone out of banks and is now to be shown as defaulted bank loans is a matter of record with the nationalized commercial banks (NCBs), the development finance institutions (DFIs) and the cooperative societies. The books are there. All told, this misappropriated money would be in hundreds of billion. This money belonged to the people of It was in the hands of the governments of It is lost to the people. It is lost to the state as well. But nobody seems to be worried.

This mountain of money cannot vanish. It must be somewhere with some people. Those who have grabbed hold of this wealth of the people are known, indeed very well known. Why is it so difficult to locate the money and retrieve it? 

Again it is known, or can be known if one wanted to know, how much of national wealth (un-foreign exchange) was taken out of the banks between May 28 and 29, 1998. The finance minister had promised to publish a list. No list has been published to date. the country has escaped default on international financial commitments barely by the skin of its teeth. It was reduced to this degrading extremity because the country had been pitilessly robbed at a time when it was confronted with one of the most traumatic crises of its life.

This is by no means a comprehensive record of the plunder that Pakistan has been subjected to over the last four decades. But it does expose one unexampled decadent side of our national character _ the depth of shamelessness to which we can debase itself. All the robbers are known entities. The robbers know that every body knows they are robbers. They flaunt their ill-gotten wealth. They live in their palaces and make distasteful display of their loot. they don't bat an eyelid. Not a shred of shame.

With their names on bank loan defaulters' list, with their names openly mentioned in public linking them to all manner of wrongdoing, how do these gentlemen face their children? When parents become shameless in the eyes of their children, that is the limit, or perhaps beyond the limit.

In Pakistan it is known to everybody that a major part of the country's economy is under ground. The smugglers, drug peddlers and tax dodgers preside over this empire. It is called 'informal' sector of Pakistan's economy. We are now becoming a society in which theft is the major source of the wealth of the rich: power thefts, water theft (from irrigation canals), car thefts. perhaps the most shameful of thefts is committed in our national museums. Thieves do not spare even museum pieces of infinite value and national pride.

Gross irregularities characterize the electoral process. Voters lists are tampered with by 'influentials' with complete immunity. Violent crimes against society and state go uninvestigated, and hence also unpunished. In all these crimes only the 'influentials' enjoy a completely free hand. The nation knows this. The culprits know that the nation knows. It seems it doesn't matter to anyone.

The nation lives with this rotten element sitting on top of it. There is no sign of social disapproval of plunder. the robber barons have no shame. What leaves one speechless is that the victims of this incredible loot and humiliation have no urge to express their explicit disapproval. On one side, we have shamelessness, on the other spinelessness. What a combination. 

Fellow Pakistanis if you have tears, prepare to shed then now.

(Dawn 13.2.1999)

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