THE current turmoil raging in Pakistan seeking expulsion of Ambassador of France from the country, is nothing but an Islamist excess that does not stand to reason. Islamist groups are protesting publication of what they call blasphemous caricatures in a French journal last September. These groups have unleashed violence in several cities in Pakistan and are attacking security forces. The atmosphere is so politically-vitiated that many in the security forces, too, are joining the bandwagon in what can be described as signs of revolt against the Government that is refusing to expel the French diplomat, at least until now. In order to off-set this political upsurge, the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has allowed one of its members to move a bill in his personal capacity, seeking the French Ambassador’s immediate expulsion. These shenanigans point to excess of unreasonable emotion now dominating Pakistan’s internal discourse that may eventually eat up Prime Minister Mr. Imran Khan’s political career.

 

Of course, in Pakistan, resorting to senseless religious politics has been a matter of dogma and fashion. The French Ambassador actually has nothing to do with the publication of objectionable cartoons about a year ago. But in Pakistan, religious sentiments are boiling over -- obviously with an idea of unseating the ruling party. Such has been the method and manner of internal politics of Pakistan for the past seventy-plus years since the country’s formation. Governments have fallen on absolutely unreasonable premises just because the country lacks the philosophical maturity to handle such issues. Watching Pakistan’s internal scenario from across the border in India, sane elements are often surprised how a country can ruin itself pursuing issues that carry no sense, no direction. This philosophical waywardness, thus, has become Pakistan’s established style of domestic politics.

 

So bad has the situation become on the ground that one Prime Minister Imran Khan cannot control the direction of the twisted discourse and direct it to a healthy outcome. But then, this has been the condition during the tenures of all rulers through the past seventy-plus years. Of course, a country does not reach its final doom overnight. Pakistan, too, will take its own time all right. But there also is never a doubt that in the next few years, the country will actually crumble under the weight of its own incompetence to govern itself wisely. Though Pakistan’s founder Barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah wanted to give the country some secular identity, he failed in the effort only because the very idea of Pakistan was based on the partition of undivided India on religious basis. Eventually, as some evidence suggests, Barrister Jinnah did realise the importance of secularism as a core principle of governance. But the country rejected it flatly and ensured that the founder met with his end in an unfortunate socio-political isolation of a terrible kind. What followed in Pakistan since that time is nothing but a senseless, directionless excess in the name of Islam, dumbfounding saner elements in that country and elsewhere.

 

The current troubles in Pakistan are dragging the country into a patently wrong direction, though nobody seems strong enough to pause and think of bringing to end the philosophical chaos of the day. Uncouth interests of the Army in Pakistan’s political affairs, and the Army pandering by political community have ensured that it is foolhardy to expect a redemption from the chaos. That is the reason why most observers of the current scenario are predicting Pakistan’s doom sooner or later. Signs are already available that Pakistan may follow its own model of gross political misbehaviour internally and internationally in its handling of issues like Balochistan -- as well as other provinces -- and lead its own way to further cleavage in the next quarter of a century. By way of that, it will only prove that its basic two-nation theory that led to a religion-based Partition of India, was altogether wrong (and not just utopian).