In response to my article last Sunday titled "Revolution? No Thanks," I received numerous emails and texts. While most complimented my insight, a few raised important questions: Why hasn't Pakistan seen a systemic overthrow in its 80-year history, unlike Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, or the brewing student activism in India?
And will we ever see a Cockroach, Wangchuk or Gen-Z Jantar Mantar movement in our country? Before I take up these questions, I pay tribute to the students of Jantar Mantar and to every resistance movement against oppressors worldwide. The movement in India has exposed the limits of the Modi's propaganda.
Meanwhile, it is also exposing the hypocrisy in our part of the world: politicians and the media criticise Modi's policies - as they should - yet they lose all empathy when it comes to the oppressed under their noses. The metaphorical Jantar Mantar on Thandi Sarak, Hyderabad - protesting the kleptocracy of the SPSC as well as all calls for the recovery of Priya Kumari - struck them dumb. This hypocrisy offers a clue as to why the system outlasts its counterparts elsewhere.
Pakistan has personifications of Cockroach, Wangchuk and Jantar Mantar serving different purposes in our society. That is, if Cockroach, Wangchuk and Gen-Z Jantar Mantar symbolise a resiliently oppressed youth, altruism and a bastion of resistance in India, respectively, they stand differently in our part of the world. The cockroach not only symbolises a resilient victim public, it also embodies the true benefactors of this brute system.
The system's survival for nearly eight decades demonstrates the cockroach's remarkable resilience, which far outlasts the grit of the oppressed. This is because Pakistan's cockroach system is sustained by bureaucrats, clergy, soul-selling members of the intelligentsia and media, and feudal and tribal lords - all bound together by mutually reinforcing interests that reach every corner of the country. In our context, Wangchuk is a planted cockroach who displays a faint pulse of public empathy, aimed at hijacking any potential people's movement.
Had Sonam Wangchuk been in Pakistan and led a rights movement, he would have either already been sponsored, or would have long traded away the grievances and rights he claims to champion, gotten co-opted into the cockroach system, or made a personal fortune abroad.
Summary from source