'It has been 75 years': How India's rise is churning out self-critical public sentiment in Pakistan

As Indian and Pakistani cricketers prepare to compete with each other in the Cricket World Cup tournament, apparently Pakistanis back home have already mentally resigned themselves to their team coming up short against India. An unprintable expletives-laden Punjabi joke about its poor prospects is said to be doing the rounds in Lahore. In polite translation, it means that “our paper tigers will come home with their tails between their legs”. Such public acknowledgement of the Indian team’s superiority vis-à-vis their own is rare in Pakistan. And thereby hangs a tale of a new self-critical public sentiment borne out of decades of pent-up frustration and anger with successive regimes. For the first time in 75 years, Pakistanis appear to be in an uncharacteristically confessional mood. Ordinary Pakistanis, hitherto almost scared to criticise their country in public, have taken to openly questioning the policies that have brought the country to its knees. Even more notable is their new-found admiration for India’s economic and scientific achievements, most recently reflected in the success of its Chandrayaan-3 mission. In the weeks following India’s joining the high table of “space superpowers”, Pakistani social media was flush with comments contrasting Islamabad’s collapse with Delhi’s rising economic and technological muscle. Even the country’s notoriously jingoistic TV anchors and Youtubers have gone rogue, as it were, openly referring to Pakistan as a failed state and blaming the political class and mullahs for the existential crisis it is facing. Watch:

This video, in which a TV reporter asks random members of the public what they think of Chandrayaan’s success, offers a stark snapshot of the depth of people’s disillusionment and anger as they let off steam. Some try to conceal their anger by resorting to jokes with one saying: “Hum to pehle hi se chaand par pahunch chuken hai. Bijli nahin, paani nahin, cheeni nahin!” ( With no electricity, no water, no sugar in Pakistan, it has always felt like living on the moon.) One man bursts into laughter when asked if thought Pakistan would ever reach the moon. He then says:“Abhi to main yeh koshish kar raha hoon ke mujhe kisi European mulk ka visa mil jayee. Jis din mil gaya aur main wahan chala gaya, main samjhoonga ke main chaand se oopar pahunch gaya. Main jannat me aa gaya.” (Right now I am desperately trying to see if I can get a work visa for a European country. If I get it I’ll regard it as landing on the moon. I’ll be in heaven.) Comparisons with India were dismissed as a joke. As one interviewee put it:“Hamara un se koi muqabla hi nahin…woh har cheez mein hum se aage hain– show biz, education level, medical, hum unki kitaben bhi parhte hain. Kahan woh kahan hum.” (There’s no comparison with India. They’re ahead in everything– show biz, education level, medical field, we even read their books.) We heard how Pakistan was lagging behind on almost every index of social and economic progress – from education and health to science and technology. It lacked even basic facilities such as proper roads for children to reach their school. This had put their lives at risk– as happened recently when a group of schoolchildren spent hours stranded mid-air after the cable car ferrying them to school in the absence of a road connection developed trouble. “Pachhattar saal ho gaye is mulk ko bane, India chaand pe pahun gaya, China superpower ban gaya..hum apne bachhon ke school pahunch ne kilye sarken bhi nahin bana sake (It has been 75 years since Pakistan was founded, India reached the moon, and China became a superpower, but we haven’t been able to build a proper road to ferry our children to school),” lamented one person. There were satirical references to Zulfiqar Bhutto’s famous boast that Pakistan would develop a nuclear bomb to match India even if Pakistanis were forced to “eat grass”. Today, faced with a crippling economic crisis amid shortages of essential commodities, that “eat grass” boast looks like becoming a reality. On a Geo News special show, its hosts, Huma Amir Shah and Abdullah Sultan, highlighted the stark disparity between the two nations’ aspirations and conditions.

Kaam aisa karo ki dushman bhi taarif kre. pic.twitter.com/dUIZJC5xLI

— Zaira Nizaam 🇮🇳 (@Zaira_Nizaam) August 25, 2023

  “India chaand pe pohoch gaya, hum beech mein hi phasein huye hai,” Huma can be heard saying. Pakistan, she said, needed to “broaden its horizons”. Popular TV evangelist Mufti Tariq Masood, in a video, noted the criticism levelled against the mullahs but pushed back, saying the country was not run by them but by politicians (“Jab se India chand pe gaya hai hamara bara mazaaq udaya ja raha hai—Cheeni nahi mil rahi hai, paan bhi hindustan se aa raha hai; khan ko kuch nahi hai; yeh gutke par chal rahi hai”). All this is unprecedented. It is hard to recall such public denunciations of Pakistan’s ruling elite, even by ordinary mortals, let alone outspoken critics. Still rarer is praising India in the same breath as criticising Pakistan. It is like all the rage bottled up over the years has suddenly found release, triggered by a sense of humiliation. Yet, nobody in the ruling cabal, comprising the army, the politicians, and the mullahs, is willing to take responsibility for crashing Jinnah’s grand dream of a progressive, modern, and secular Muslim state. Its current crisis is the culmination of 75 years of wrong priorities promoted by successive regimes, their utter contempt for ordinary people, and a cynical abuse of religion in the name of upholding Islamic identity. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistan’s famous physicist and activist, charts in his new book, Origins, Identity, and Future, the factors behind its decline and fall. It shows the extent to which its people were fed gratuitous lies by their rulers to justify gross corruption and abuse of power. Hoodbhoy has had a ringside view of Pakistan’s tempestuous journey and draws on his personal experience to explain its slow decay: degenerating first into a “failed democracy” and now hovering on the brink of becoming a “failing society” plagued by a politics of hatred and exclusion. Asked in an interview where he sees Pakistan headed, he offered an unremittingly bleak prognosis. “This story doesn’t have an ending. The military and civilian elites will continue to award themselves massive tax breaks and perks of every sort. The rich will continue to be rich; the poor will get a lot poorer. The country will survive, whatever that means,” he told The Friday Times. It is not surprising, then, that Pakistanis are finally speaking up. They have had enough of it. The writer is an independent columnist and the author of Unmasking Indian Secularism: Why We Need A New Hindu-Muslim Deal_. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect_ Firstpost’s views. Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.