See it in their eyes, sense it through their leathery skin. The victims of the floods carry the burden of a lifetime of misery.

The tide of failure
By Cyril Almeida Friday, 20 Aug, 2010



Traumatised, lives shattered, you expect the flood victims to look a certain way. But it’s more than that. The victims are clearly not new acquaintances of adversity. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their eyes, sense it through their leathery skin. The victims of the floods carry the burden of a lifetime of misery. - Photo by AP.

It didn’t register immediately. That the flood coverage is really about two catastrophes, not one. There is of course the damage caused by the flooding itself, the one Pakistan will take years to recover from. Then there’s the damage of the last 63 years that the floods have uncovered.

By now everyone’s seen them on television screens, the miles-long processions of barely recognisable humanity, the materially dispossessed, the broken and the bowed.

Traumatised, lives shattered, you expect the flood victims to look a certain way. But it’s more than that. The victims are clearly not new acquaintances of adversity. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their eyes, sense it through their leathery skin. The victims of the floods carry the burden of a lifetime of misery.

The second catastrophe: the great floods of 2010 have uncovered 63 years of the great unwashed masses of this country. The people the state has failed in the most terrible of ways, not this week, not last month, but over its entire, sordid history.

Everyone knows, or should know, there is poverty here. Thirty-five per cent, 20 per cent, 45 per cent, whatever it was or is, the number is large. But in an antiseptic sort of way: sterile, faceless numbers, percentage points haggled over by bureaucrats that would appear to mean little — unless you stop to think those little decimals are dividing 170 million.

Still, that poverty exists here and is a significant problem shouldn’t be a surprise. Everyone has seen the poverty, in the cities, in the towns, in villages. But it’s quite another thing to see it on this scale, up and down the country, the length and breadth.

All at the same time, every ethnicity, every pocket of suffering. A human canvas of misery stitched together from 10 million, 20 million, tales of wretchedness. Many of the people on our television screens and newspaper pages aren’t just flood victims, they are living indictments of the Pakistani state failing large swathes of its citizenry.

Pakistanis who can afford to think about poverty, by definition the non-poor here, are usually quite casual about it. There’s no real structural, or structured, thought put into it. A few notes and coins dropped into grubby, outstretched hands at a traffic light, a langar organised here and there, and that’s about it.

There is, however, some pride taken in the fact (assumption, speculation, really) that ‘we’ don’t have poverty on a scale that the Indians do. Pfft, India Shining. Have you seen the poverty there, they’ll ask. There’s 450 million of them. It’s so shameful, they’ll tut-tut, and the place is so dirty. And the US? Did you know that the world’s richest country has a 14 per cent poverty rate, they’ll sniff.

Poverty here? Over here, there’s some vague recognition that the Thar area and swathes of Balochistan are backward places; that southern Punjab and upper Sindh are poor; that northern Pakistan and the tribal areas haven’t been developed. But there’s little understanding about what that means, that it translates into millions upon millions of the poorest of the poor, quite literally a mass of humanity existing outside and away from the tattered umbrella of the Pakistani state.

The floods have brought all those people into our living rooms. Seeing the broken bodies on television, the sunken eyes captured through a photographer’s lens, you can easily deduce many have never seen the inside of a clinic or a school, have probably never had two square meals in a day in their lives — every last one of them a Pakistani, but for whom that is as theoretical a concept as an escape from poverty.

In the unhappiest of ways, the floods of 2010 and the violence at the start of the new millennium have book-ended a decade of exposures of state failures here, a catalogue of human misery.

We’ve failed the people of Fata. We’ve failed the people of Swat. We’ve failed Balochistan. We’ve failed southern Punjab. We’ve failed the people of Karachi. We’ve failed the denizens of Lahore and Islamabad racked by violence. We’ve failed the freshly minted middle class whose incomes and jobs have been decimated. We’ve failed the rural poor.

The roll call of failures is long, depressing and is continuing.

In recent weeks, looking at India, Balochistan, Afghanistan and now Karachi has taken me frequently to the offices and homes of a slice of the Pakistani state machinery, in search of answers on state policy.

The luxury SUVs and sedans I have to weave through in the driveways and the well-appointed, sometimes garish, offices and living rooms, I notice — you can’t help but notice — but I don’t begrudge them. Silks and baubles are the favoured pastimes of the powerful the world over.

I have, however, often come away thinking one thing, do they even get it?

Strategic concerns, vote banks, cutthroat politics, in all of that stuff it’s never quite clear: where exactly in the bluster of the uniformed and the snivelling of the non-uniformed is the concern for the people of Pakistan, about making this country a better place, more responsive to the needs of its people?

Yes, deep down you know that the problems here would test the best government, the best administration and the best armed forces in the world. But we have none of those luxuries.

You know that Pakistan isn’t a failed state. But it is a state of failures, repeated and egregious.

You know that finite resources mean some must go without. But you know that many will just get swept under the fraying rug of green and white, out of mind before they are even out of sight.

I don’t mind the challenges, one of those tilting against windmills told me recently, because challenges can help focus the human mind.

Then, resignedly, he said, I just don’t get it, they don’t seem to care.
cyril.a@gmail.com