“I sit by the roadside / The driver changes the wheel / I do not like the place I have come from / I do not like the place I am going to / Why with impatience do I watch him changing the wheel?” says poet Bertolt Brecht. You are at a visa application centre in Lahore. You can hear and see children, even toddlers whining. You can guess from the people’s facial expressions and body language that they are like poet Brecht: they neither like the place they come from nor they like the place want to go to. But still they are impatient to go to the places they won’t be comfortable with.

Let’s try very briefly to understand what triggers such a tediously paradoxical process. Their dislike of the western societies is cultural in its nature, more specifically it’s related with the social norms and values the open societies uphold and practice. Their dislike of their homeland is a product of economic and social injustice premised on the notion of inequality thought to be natural.

Material resources are monopolised by a tiny elite, recipient of colonial largesse that sees its self-advancement as welfare of all it rules. In the post-colonial period it has practically become more powerful and ruthless than their erstwhile colonial masters. Firstly it assumed all the authority exercised by colonial rulers because after the end of foreign rule it did not change the structures and laws that facilitated people’s exploitation with impunity ad infinitum. So much so that a law enacted in the colonial era is still intact that authorises a policeman to arrest any citizen after sunset on the charge of vagrancy / wandering (Awaragardi) and lock him/her up with no offence committed.

In addition to colonial laws meant to curb the movement and freedom of the people who could resist the exploitation, the elite has brought in new laws to tighten its grip on economic, political and social life. The state managed from the top has arrogated to itself the right to make or break anybody in the economic sphere. Pakistani state after its emergence built mills, factories and banks in the name of industrialisation with huge loans borrowed from the banks, state-owned and private. With all things in place its favourites got them all dirt cheap. It was a royal gesture that made the rich richer at the expense of miserably poor taxpayers. The state can gift land to anybody who is somebody even now, if and when, it chooses to do so.

In the countryside feudal estates were left untouched; they, the colonial gifts, were neither reduced in size nor were made to pay tax in any form. Secondly, judicial institutions, the jetsam and flotsam of the Raj, meant to serve the foreign occupying forces, were never dismantled or reformed. Thus they spectacularly served the new desi philistine masters.

If a peasant’s small piece of land, for example, is grabbed by his powerful neighbouring land owner, he will have to drag his feet to the courts for at least 20 years hardly expecting any favourable verdict.

A strong nexus exists between bureaucracy - civil and khaki - and judiciary that protects and promotes the interests of the elite. This nexus not only deprives people of economic justice and judicial relief but also functions as a bulwark against the ambitions of working and middle class young men and women to join the echelon of power through prestigious jobs in different organs of the state. It all remains ‘in the family’ and family comprises not more than 2,000 houses. This country of 220 million perpetually remains at the mercy of a transparently opaque network that has ‘God’s plenty’ appropriated by hook or by crook.

In such trying conditions, people see few opportunities and little chance of upward social mobility which forces them to look elsewhere. Elite’s dereliction of its historical duty, i.e. to lead into better future, has worsened the situation beyond repair because it loves to lord over impoverished masses to spice its primitive ego.

Elites in the developed societies try to paper over the economic and social inequalities by improving people’s conditions of life, while our desi elite, morally bankrupt and intellectually primitive, loves to flaunt such inequalities by glaringly exposing the differences which distinguish it from the masses it rules. The situation is exacerbated by some other factors such as absence of rule of law and population explosion.

Laws are made by the elite or its representatives in their own class interest but the proclaimed objective is touted as a well-meaning effort to regulate life at individual and collective level. Laws thus enacted are flouted by the powerful with panache as if it’s a mark of an adventurous lifestyle. This further scares the poor and the lowly, even middle classes as they can’t afford this luxury. They can be victims of lawlessness at any moment. And population explosion!

People feel compelled to produce more and more babies out of ignorance, poverty, and lack of female literacy and above all fear of future. As the state offers no security net or benefits to old people, a large family may prove a source of solace in terms of help and care from some of their offspring. Such a hope is their surety bond.

People with no prospects see a ray of hope in advanced societies about which they hear and see a lot in the wake of IT revolution. Some of them may be able to cross over but sadly they would not be lucky enough to be fully happy. Economic uplift can never be the sole source of happiness. An individual like society is a mélange of different values inherited consciously and subconsciously in a particular social space. He/she would face a challenging crisis when transplanted to a different soil regardless of reasons. So our men and women from working and middle classes would find extremely hard if not impossible to strike roots over there. Men after their drink at the bar would go around looking for ‘halal’ (Kosher) meat and women when out would self-consciously feel flustered to cover their chests fearing real and imagined male eye.