Mosharraf Zaidi

Owning up to our fake degrees

http://thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=251278

Saturday, July 17, 2010
by Mosharraf Zaidi

When the nation was aflame with moral outrage last year in November, it was because our collective anger about corruption in Pakistan had seemingly boiled over. The NRO was leading the headlines, and the PPP’s lashkar-e-haq, led by the venerable religious and legal scholar, Dr Babar Awan, was producing a steady stream of some of the most creative legal arguments we’ve ever heard in this, the most creative of Islamic Republic endeavours, ever.

Then, in April this year, Pakistani morality came to know and hate the name Jamshed Dasti. Dasti, an otherwise nothing politician from Southern Punjab, had to resign for having a fake degree, but was still nominated by the PPP, backed by the prime minister, and pulled out another win in the bye-election for NA 178.

The Dasti saga has now generated an entire industry of moral outrage over fake degrees. Pakistan’s moral compass is, once again, in full bloom. Fake degrees are the new NRO. Perhaps seeing a smiling Jamshed Dasti’s virtual middle finger is not enough for the urban middle class’s insatiable appetite for undignified political awakenings. Which is just as well. The PPP-PML-N–PML-Q nexus of incredibly resourceful political operators are just fine with being labelled village idiots by the uber-sophisticated and morally righteous, newspaper-reading city-folk that hate them. If the Dastis of this world are laughing it is for good reason. The three mainstream political parties in this country are not in any way in short supply of Jamshed Dastis. In fact, there are plenty more where he comes from but there are none of where the moral outrage over fake degrees comes from. The joke is on us.

What is the outrage over fake degrees really all about? It is about two dangerous and depressing trends. First, it is about demonising politics and politicians. Second, it is about evading individual and collective political responsibility in Pakistan’s urban centres. Both trends threaten to keep Pakistan locked up in the 19th century — where banning Facebook, destroying the Universal Service Fund, taxing the transactions of the urban middle class, and empowering people like Jamshed Dasti all make eminent economic, political and social sense. Getting our understanding of the fake-degree outrage is essential not because of its moral semantics. It is essential because allowing ourselves to be carried away by our emotions about cheating and corruption is to the detriment of this country’s future.

We are outraged by the fake degrees and the fake apologies that accompany them because we feel morally obligated to remonstrate. Corruption, lying, cheating, stealing and deception are all deplorable. But the issue of the corruption of politicians, while an important challenge for public policy in this country, is really a red herring. When it enters the national conversation in Pakistan, corruption has little to do with moral probity in the public space.

If it did, we’d be obsessing just as much about the rent-seeking and contract-fat in banking and finance, the military, the judiciary, the fast-moving consumer goods industry, journalism and the business of religion. Why did the snack boxes PIA serves on domestic flights become as big as cartons recently? Why do roads keep getting dug up and re-carpeted in Defence? How many judges have been prosecuted for taking bribes since March 2009? Why doesn’t the ISPR publish the process of land and plot allotment for military officers on its website? And why doesn’t the Establishment Division do the same for all APUG officers? Why should journalists, rather than nurses, be more deserving of government largesse when it comes to plots? Where would PMA Kakul rank on HEC’s rankings, in terms of the quality of its bachelor’s programme? Where do religious groups get all this money to put up banners and posters? Why do those groups seem more active during certain news cycles than others? Why don’t municipal services managers prosecute the graffiti of religious groups? How many successful businessmen will tell you honestly that they’ve never paid a bribe?

We don’t ask these questions because we have programmed ourselves into a small box where the only morally repugnant group of Pakistanis worth taking to task are politicians. A demonised and degraded political class is to the benefit of many politically sterile groups of people: military officers who pine for the days of Gen Musharraf, technocrats who will only move to Pakistan if they are made heads of organisations, senior DMG officers who occupy the only win/win space in Pakistan’s complex landscape, and judges that are keen to make suo moto the new mode of institutional governance in Pakistan. These folks could never beat Jamshed Dasti in a democracy. And as long as we keep demonising politicians, they won’t have to.

Talking about fake degrees and doing so ad infinitum means that you are either so emotional that you’ve lost sight of reason or it means that you actively wish to aid and abet the demonisation and de-legitimisation of Pakistani politicians. Neither is acceptable. We cannot do without politicians, or without politics. And we definitely can afford no further irrationality in our public discourse.

This brings us to the second trend that the fake degrees brouhaha highlights: evading individual and collective political responsibility. Sure, shehri babus — both of the English medium, and Urdu medium variety — despise the politics of the thaana-kuthchehri, and the gulli-mohalla. Their contempt is not unjustified. Yet, we seem to be capable of nothing more than ad infinitum condemnations of politicians. This is lazy and arrogant at best and an approbation of the status quo at worst. Pakistani politicians might indeed be overwhelmingly made up of people with whom decent, educated city-folk want nothing to do with. But neither the politicians, nor our 35 million Pakistani brothers and sisters that voted for them in February 2008 particularly care. In short, this moral outrage is generating a grand total of zero positive outcomes.

If we cannot do without politics and politicians, and we’ve determined that these politicians and their politics are unacceptable, then the only possible solution to our conundrum is to change the politics and the politicians.

This requires courage and action. Not mere words. Not everybody has to join a political party or run for office. But at least the moral class — those literate, urban-dwellers that the entire television news industry caters to — should know who their representatives are. And their representatives should know who they are too. Call them. Go meet them. Tell them what you like and dislike. Of course, if you live in any kind of housing society (you know who you are Defence-wallahs) you won’t be surprised to learn that you don’t have representation. Think about that too. You choose to disengage from the galli and naala in this country. What grounds do you have for your moral outrage?

And while we ponder that, perhaps let us take a break from the hyperventilating about fake degrees. We must stop letting feelings dictate our behaviour. A society’s politicians are a reflection of the morals and ethos of the society itself. Perhaps we are angry at ourselves, perhaps at the Dastis, perhaps at the tens of thousands of brothers and sisters that voted for him. This anger is useless. We have fake degrees in our politics because we have fake degrees in our society. We choose these things, they do not fall from the sky. This is our society, these are our politicians. Let’s not demonise them too much. We are only demonising ourselves.