So Where Are You Going?

An essay on a nation, its ledger, and the road it has not yet chosen

There is a moment in Surah At-Takwir (Quran) when the sky is stripped away like a scroll and the whole architecture of the world comes apart. The sun is folded up. The stars are put out. The mountains are set moving. The pregnant camel being the most valuable property a man of that desert could own is abandoned in the sand because on that day no one will care what he owns. The seas boil over. And then, in the middle of that vast unmaking, comes a question so quiet it is easy to miss: Fa ayna tadhhabūn ‘’so where are you going?’’

It is not a rhetorical flourish. It is an interrogation. And it is worth noticing what the Surah pauses on amid all that cosmic violence: not the emperors, not the armies, but a buried infant girl, who is asked for what crime she was killed. Not her killers but she is the one who is asked. The Qur’an, at the end of the world, stops to name a domestic cruelty that a whole society had agreed to overlook.

We might ask ourselves the question in the same spirit today. We have made the seas rise by our own hand. We have set the forests on fire and called it development. In the past three years alone, the so-called leaders of the human race have managed the near-total flattening of one city after another while the rest of us scrolled past. We pillage, and we have grown sophisticated enough to pillage in the language of security, of markets, of stabilisation, of necessity. And so, the question falls on us with more force than it fell on the Quraysh of Makkah: where are you going?

Ask it at three levels, because it operates at all three. Spiritually: what, exactly, are we accumulating that we imagine we will carry across? At the micro level: what have we built in our own homes, in our own conduct on a Tuesday morning in traffic, in the way we speak to the man who brings our tea? And at the macro level: where is this collective vehicle, this republic of 245 million souls, actually headed. Did any of us consent to the direction, or did we simply stop steering?

Have we chosen the right path for ourselves and for our children? That is the whole essay. Everything below is footnote.

Let me begin with an embarrassment.

Anyone who has spent time with the colonial settlement literature of the Punjab the district gazetteers, the census reports, the settlement officers’ assessments will have run into a particular verdict passed on us. It is scattered across that whole shelf. S. S. Thorburn, a settlement officer who rose to Financial Commissioner, wrote in Musalmans and Money-Lenders in the Punjab (1886) that the Muslim peasant was a short-sighted and long-suffering animal, spendthrift and improvident. Later gazetteers carried the same freight in politer clothing: the inhabitants of one district described as less alert and less industrious than the ordinary Punjabi; the Hindu commended for domestic economy, the Muslim for nothing in particular. G. C. Walker’s Gazetteer of the Lahore District, 1893-94 sits on that same shelf, catalogues our tribes in the same taxonomy of who could be trusted with a plough and who could not, and reserves its warmest prose for the Mall and its European shops.

The genre said it a hundred ways, and the genre was doing a job: it was manufacturing a racial theory of laziness precisely at the moment the Punjab’s water, land and labour were being reorganised for extraction. It was a lie in the service of a canal system.

Here is the embarrassment. It was a lie and we have spent 130 years neglecting to disprove it.

We were meant to answer that ledger. That was the entire promise of 1947: give us our own country and watch what we do with it. Instead, a foreigner’s slander about our disposition has been allowed to survive because we keep supplying it with circumstantial evidence in the pothole nobody fills, in the file that moves only when weighted, in the queue nobody forms, in the two-hour meeting that decides nothing, in the brilliant young engineer who concludes, correctly, that his talent will be better rewarded in Dubai. The Gora Sahib is long gone. We have kept his ledger open, and we keep making entries in it ourselves.

Turn the question outward for a moment, because Pakistan does not live in a vacuum.

There are fifty-seven Muslim-majority states. Between them they hold the majority of the world’s proven hydrocarbon reserves, the two Great Holy mosques, some of the youngest populations on earth, and a combined economy that ought to make them a pole of the international system. What they do not hold is a single position they can agree on.

Look at what that discord has purchased. Gaza today is not a war zone; it is a site. Roughly four-fifths of its structures are damaged and two-thirds of those destroyed. Some sixty-one million tonnes of rubble sit on top of the dead, laced with asbestos and unexploded ordnance. Reconstruction is priced by the World Bank, UN and EU at upwards of seventy-one billion dollars over five years, and virtually none of it has begun; more than a million and a half people are still in tents nearly a year after a ceasefire that has never quite stopped being a war. In Lebanon, Israeli forces sit on something close to a fifth of the country’s territory in the south, more than a million people have been displaced, and the negotiations in Rome grind on over the sequencing of a withdrawal that keeps receding. Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, one could go around the room. In almost every case the decisive factor was not the strength of the adversary but the absence of anyone on our side of the table who could speak for more than himself.

Allama Iqbal saw the mechanism a century ago and named it without mercy in Jawab-e-Shikwa:

منفعت ایک ہے اس قوم کی، نقصان بھی ایک

ایک ہی سب کا نبی، دین بھی، ایمان بھی ایک

حرمِ پاک بھی، اللہ بھی، قرآن بھی ایک

کچھ بڑی بات تھی ہوتے جو مسلمان بھی ایک

One interest binds this people, one loss; one Prophet, one faith, one creed; one sacred sanctuary, one God, one Book — would it have been so very much to ask that the Muslims, too, be one?

That is not a devotional sentiment. It is a strategic audit, delivered in verse. And its conclusion has been confirmed by every decade since.

Now come home.

Pakistan has been a member of the International Monetary Fund since July 1950 and has entered into twenty-five arrangements with it since. Twenty-five. There is no polite way to describe an economy that has been on emergency medication for most of its adult life. As of the last Economic Survey, total public debt stood at over Rs 83 trillion roughly Rs 57.6 trillion domestic and Rs 25.7 trillion external at about 68.5 per cent of GDP. Growth for FY26 came in at 3.7 per cent, the fastest in four years, which sounds like good news until you set it against a population growing at well over two per cent and a per capita income of roughly $1,700, among the lowest in South Asia. Bangladesh, which we lost in 1971 and then spent fifty years condescending to, now has a larger economy than ours in nominal terms.

The deeper wound is the tax base. Federal tax revenue is projected to hover around ten to eleven per cent of GDP. A country cannot educate, police, litigate or defend itself on eleven per cent. And the composition is worse than the number: much of the recent improvement has come from petroleum levies and central bank transfers rather than from any durable widening of the net, while agriculture, retail and much of services remain effectively outside it. The salaried man is taxed at source, ruthlessly, because he is legible. The large landholder, the trader with three sets of books, the plot-file speculator who has never in his life produced a taxable good, these remain matters of negotiation. So the “primary surplus” we are congratulated for by our lenders is, in significant part, development expenditure not incurred: schools not built, canals not lined, hospitals not staffed. We have balanced the books by taking the future off them. Allama Iqbal’s line has become an accounting identity: 

‘’jis khet se dehqān ko muyassar nahīñ rotī, us khet ke har khosha-e-gandum ko jalā do’’ burn every ear of wheat in a field that will not feed the man who works it.

The Quaid-e-Azam anticipated exactly this. On 1 July 1948, opening the State Bank of Pakistan, one of the last public acts of his life, delivered by a dying man, he warned against importing Western economic theory wholesale, observing that it had failed to solve humanity’s problems and had helped produce two world wars, and urged that we build an economy on our own principles of social justice and human equality. We ignored the substance and kept the letterhead. We did not construct an indigenous political economy; we constructed a rentier one, in which the state’s chief function became the distribution of protections, a tariff here, an exemption there, a plot, a licence, a subsidy on gas for the right industry to whoever could reach the room. Every serious reform of the last three decades has died at the same door: it required someone powerful to pay tax, and no government has been strong enough, or clean enough, to insist.

If the economy is our arithmetic problem, the law is our credibility problem, and it is worse.

There are, on the most recent official counts, somewhere between 2.2 and 2.4 million cases pending before Pakistan’s courts. Around 82 per cent of them sit in the district judiciary, and roughly 56,000 in the Supreme Court alone. A number that stood near 20,000 a decade earlier. Justice (Rd.) Syed Mansoor Ali Shah put the consequence more bluntly than any editorialist could: delay deters investment, renders contracts illusory, and corrodes the institutional legitimacy of the judiciary itself. He was not exaggerating. In our civil practice, a straightforward suit for specific performance takes a decade; a partition suit can outlive the parties; an inheritance dispute over a village holding routinely descends to the grandchildren, by which time the land has been sold twice and the record of rights is a work of fiction. I have watched families ruin themselves for a decree that arrived too late to mean anything, and I have watched the other kind of litigant the one who never wanted a decree at all, only the delay. Just to win by simply outlasting the process.

The rot is not merely administrative. A legal system’s authority rests on a single perception: that the same rule will be applied to the powerful and to the weak. When the same court can move at lightning speed in one matter and hibernate for eleven years in another, when non-bailable warrants evaporate for the well-connected and are executed with enthusiasm against the poor, when the appointment and jurisdiction of judges becomes the central battlefield of ordinary politics as it has now become, through successive constitutional amendments that reasonable lawyers can and do argue about in good faith on both sides. The citizen draws the only rational conclusion available to him. He concludes that the law is a weapon, not a shelter. And once he concludes that, he begins settling matters himself: with a biradari panchayat, with a police contact, with a mob. Every lynching in this country is, among other things, a verdict on our courts. Iqbal’s instruction was not decorative ‘’Sabaq phir parh sadāqat kā, adālat kā, shujā’at kā’’,  go back and learn the lesson of truth, of justice, of courage. He put justice in the middle of that list for a reason.

And then there are the roads, which is where the nation actually lives.

Go stand at any major intersection in Lahore at half past eight in the morning. You will see four lanes of traffic occupying seven lanes of road. You will see the ambulance that no one moves for. You will see the motorcyclist riding against the flow because it saves him ninety seconds, the man who has parked across a driveway because he will “only be a minute”, the shopkeeper whose encroachment has eaten a third of the footpath so that schoolchildren walk in the carriageway, the heap of refuse at the corner that everyone contributes to and no one owns. Not one of these people is a criminal. Every one of them is a decent man who prays, gives to charity, is generous to guests, and would give you his own dinner if you were hungry in his home. And every one of them has decided, on entirely rational grounds, that the commons belongs to no one and therefore anything taken from it is free.

That is the gnawing at the root. It is not a shortage of virtue; our private virtue is genuinely remarkable. It is the absence of civic virtue, the specific moral intuition that there exists a shared thing, that I am part-owner of it, and that degrading it degrades me. Without that intuition, no amount of legislation will help; you cannot police a society into decency. And it compounds: the smog that shuts our schools every November, the water table under our city dropping metre by metre, the twenty-six million children out of school, the sanitation worker whose life expectancy we have decided is not our concern, the domestic worker who is a child. These are not separate crises. They are one crisis, expressed in different registers, the crisis of a people who have not yet agreed that they are a people.

Faiz understood this better than any of our economists. When he wrote of the freedom of August 1947, he refused the official jubilation and called that light stained, that dawn night-bitten, the awaited morning still not arrived and for that honesty he was called a traitor by men whose names no one now remembers. He was not being unpatriotic. He was insisting that a country is a promise and that a promise can be checked against performance. His other great injunction speak, while your tongue is still your own, while your body is still your own was addressed precisely to the moment we are in. And Iqbal supplies the corrective to our national fatalism, the shrug of ‘’qaum kā kyā hogā: afrād ke hāthoñ meñ hai aqwām kī taqdīr / har fard hai millat ke muqaddar kā sitāra’’, the fate of nations lies in the hands of individuals; each single person is a star in the destiny of the whole. The pothole is yours. The queue is yours. The tongue is yours.

Politically, we have been running the same experiment since 1958 and recording surprise at the same result.

The pattern is now so well established it could be taught as a syllabus: a civilian government is elevated, tolerated, then found wanting; the courts are drawn in; an election is held whose credibility is contested by roughly half the country; the leader who was yesterday’s necessity becomes today’s defendant and tomorrow’s exile, before returning as the day after’s necessity. Meanwhile the actual questions, provincial autonomy and the NFC award, the water we no longer have, the eighteenth amendment’s unfinished devolution, whether Balochistan is a province or a garrison, the fact that we have never held a census whose results everyone accepts are deferred indefinitely, because the men with the power to settle them are fully occupied settling each other. We do not have a politics. We have a succession crisis that has lasted sixty-eight years.

Layered on this is the rivalry we are least willing to discuss honestly. Jinnah, on 11 August 1947, told the Constituent Assembly two things. He said that in the state of Pakistan a man’s religion had nothing to do with the business of the state and that citizens would be free to go to their temples, their mosques or any other place of worship. And he named bribery, corruption, black-marketing, nepotism and jobbery as a poison to be put down with an iron hand. We have inverted both instructions with impressive precision: we made faith the business of the state and made corruption a private matter of conscience. The result is a country where a theological dispute between two schools of the same maslak can close a city, where an allegation is sufficient to summon a mob, where Jaranwala and Sialkot happen and the file closes quietly a year later. And the most instructive case is the one we never mention: Dr Abdus Salam, the only Nobel laureate in the sciences this country has produced, driven abroad and excluded. Whatever anyone’s theology, ask the practical question, what nation, having produced one such mind in seventy-eight years, can afford to spend it? Iqbal, who was our theorist and not our opponent, asked it first: firqa-bandī hai kahīñ aur kahīñ zātēñ haiñ / kyā zamāne meñ panapne kī yahī bātēñ haiñ, sects here, castes there; are these the means by which a people flourishes in the world?

Which brings me, finally, to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Set aside for a moment every argument about him and there are serious ones, which historians will go on making. Consider only the arc as this country experienced it. A migrant boy from Bhopal becomes the most celebrated man in Pakistan, the name every schoolchild knows, the face on the stamps. Then, in 2004, he reads out a confession on television. He spends years in effective house arrest, later says the confession was his mistake and that he was made a scapegoat and betrayed by men who had given him their word, and by 2012 he is describing his own country, to a foreign wire agency, as worse than a banana republic. He died in 2021 and we gave him a state funeral and a great deal of weeping.

I am not asking anyone to relitigate the man. I am asking about us. What kind of country produces a figure of that stature and then produces, in that same figure, that quality of bitterness? What is the lesson our children draw when they watch a national hero end in resentment and when they watch a Nobel laureate’s grave defaced? The lesson they draw is the one we cannot afford: do nothing for Pakistan; it will not thank you. And the terrible thing about that lesson is that once learned it requires no enforcement. It simply operates, quietly, in the departure lounge at Allama Iqbal International, in every young doctor’s IELTS application, in every brilliant girl who decides her country has no use for her.

The correction is not complicated, though it is difficult. A nation succeeds by systematically over-rewarding the people who build things and systematically under-rewarding the people who merely capture them. That means honouring our scientists while they are alive and useful, not at their funerals. It means treating a first-rate teacher in a government school in Kasur as a person of consequence. It means that the young woman who wins a robotics competition gets what the man who wins a constituency gets. It means, in the most boring and unglamorous sense, paying tax, obeying the traffic signal, filing the return, fixing the stretch of road in front of one’s own gate, and refusing to be the man who gets his file moved by knowing someone. Jinnah reduced the whole programme to three words, Unity, Faith, Discipline and to a piece of advice he gave students that we have found convenient to forget: work, work and only work.

So do not slaughter the Quaid and Iqbal. That is what we have been doing: killing them by quotation, embalming them in commemorative supplements every December and March, hanging them on office walls above desks where their instructions are broken hourly. Iqbal did not want a shrine; he wanted an argument continued. Jinnah did not want his portrait; he wanted his procedures followed. Both of them believed something about the people of this land that we have not yet had the nerve to believe about ourselves, that the material was sound, that the failure was of organisation and will, not of disposition. Which is to say: both of them were, on the central question, the exact opposite of the Gora Sahib and his ledger.

Fa ayna tadhhabūn. So where are you going?

The question is not an accusation. It is an offer. A question about direction presupposes that direction can still be changed, which is the most hopeful thing anyone has said to this country in a long while. We are 245 million people with a median age of twenty-two, the youngest large workforce in the region, a diaspora that remits more than our exports earn, a freelance economy already competing globally out of Faisalabad and Peshawar, five rivers, and a religious tradition whose first revealed command was Iqra(read). The raw material was never the problem. It never was.

Iqbal, who had every reason to despair and refused to, put it best, and I will let him close:

نہیں ہے ناامید اقبال اپنی کشتِ ویراں سے

ذرا نم ہو تو یہ مٹی بہت زرخیز ہے ساقی

Iqbal has not given up on his barren field. Let there be a little moisture, saqi this soil is very fertile.

The soil is fertile. It has always been fertile. What we have withheld is the life-giving water.