أَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

اللہ کے نام سے شروع جو بڑا مہربان نہایت رحم کرنے والا ہے

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

The Donkey's Horns

Naturally, donkeys do not have horns on their heads. This is why the Urdu proverb, "For horns to reappear from a donkey's head," is widely used to describe something utterly impossible—a phenomenon that simply cannot exist in the real world. For centuries, the ordinary citizens used a common proverb to describe an absolute impossibility: "Go ahead and wait for a donkey to grow horns."

But then, foreign colonizers invaded this land. They enacted a bizarre law decreeing that under the Crown, donkeys would be highly revered, and only those donkeys that could pass themselves off as stags with grand antlers would hold the divine right to rule. Therefore, Pakistan remains a peculiar post-colonial anomaly. Just as Amal Chatterjee exposes in his renowned book Prisoners of Empires, the mental slaves of the British Raj continue to occupy the nation's resources, ruling over their own people as proxies long after the white sahibs have departed.

These are the specific donkeys of our ruling elite who use a foreign language to "bray" in a native accent, considering themselves superior to the rest of the oppressed nation. Oh, if only someone could remind these creatures that in the entire universe, the braying of a donkey is the harshest and most unpleasant of all sounds! These characters wear the fake horns of bureaucracy, officialdom, and high-level committees on their heads, desperately trying to pass themselves off as majestic stags or the masterminds of our time. Yet, every single decision they make unmasks their incompetence, mental slavery, and sheer absurdity. To make matters worse, these state dignitaries remain absolutely stubborn in their insistence on being seen as stags.

Whenever the country faces a severe economic, administrative, or social crisis, the government’s primal, knee-jerk instinct kicks in: they immediately announce a new "committee." Whether it is a collapse in exports, the storm of hyperinflation, or the ruin of state-owned enterprises—every single grievance is treated with the exact same remedy: a closed-door committee. In reality, these circles are never platforms for genuine reform; they are merely elite bargaining tables.

When these self-proclaimed stags finally bring their long-awaited results to fruition, the enlightened minds of the nation immediately recognize the underlying incompetence. These committees are nothing more than a gathering of donkeys, and the innocent populace is left to suffer the horrifying consequences of their decisions. Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of committees; it suffers from a severe famine of knowledge, vision, and expertise within those committees. In a room dominated entirely by ministers and secretaries, neither deep scientific research takes place, nor is a single serious report ever produced.

Can anyone explain what real reforms can be proposed by these state leaders whose "knowledge" is strictly confined to the mere acquisition of a degree? What benefit can ever come from measures designed by such mountains of superficial intelligence? To find the answer, one only needs to visit any town or village in the country and look at the miserable condition of the people; the answer will become instantly clear.

In Surah Al-Jumua of the Holy Qur'an, such "highly qualified" yet ignorant individuals are compared to a donkey laden with heavy books on its back. The animal carries the physical weight of that wisdom but remains completely oblivious to the knowledge and enlightenment contained within those pages. Loading books onto its back does not turn a beast of burden into a scholar. The state of our official courts and high-level committees today is no different. Characters have gathered there simply to carry the weight of heavy files, official memos, and traditional reports. They are buried under the sheer mass of bureaucratic paperwork, yet they remain utterly devoid of real knowledge, vision, and a basic understanding of ground realities.

A review of recent federal ad-hoc committees clearly reveals this structure: nearly 36 percent of the seats are held by ministers or political appointees, while 55 percent are occupied by bureaucrats, secretaries, and state regulators. Less than 10 percent of the participants come from outside the state apparatus. Even these external figures are not independent experts; they are representatives of specific commercial lobbies and massive corporate interests who arrive only with their personal wish lists—demanding tax reliefs, regulatory relaxations, export subsidies, and tariff protections. They are vested stakeholders, not independent analysts. Once you separate self-interest from genuine expertise, the picture becomes clear: independent economists, engineers, researchers, urban planners, and data scientists are almost entirely missing from Pakistan’s committees. Is the country short of such individuals? Is the state so barren that it is incapable of breeding competent minds to oversee its affairs?

The greatest tragedy of this entire setup is that these committees rarely ever conduct serious, independent research, and their reports are almost never made public. Many committees are announced with grand pomp and media hype, but their final reports, meeting minutes, dissent notes, and foundational evidence are hidden away from both the public and independent researchers. Citizens only hear the announcement that a committee has been formed, but they are rarely allowed to see what it studied, what it rejected, who disagreed, or what data was utilized. This means civil society cannot audit their work, the media cannot compare recommendations with actual outcomes, and parliament cannot hold a serious debate on the technical merits of the reform. The public is simply told to trust a process they are legally barred from seeing. This is not an intellectual system; it is pure administrative theatre. This theatrical performance continues, and the nation is left to bear the horrifying consequences—yet, the crowning irony is that medals and state honors are distributed for these spectacular failures.

This entire setup reflects an archaic philosophy of governance, one where the Pakistani state still believes that intellect, wisdom, and comprehension are bound strictly to official hierarchy. The secretary knows simply because he is the secretary; the minister decides simply because he is the minister. Meanwhile, the citizen, the researcher, and the university are left standing outside the locked door.

Modern economies cannot be managed this way. Today’s policy challenges—be it energy grids, logistics, artificial intelligence, or taxation—are incredibly complex and demand highly specialized knowledge. No generalist bureaucracy can master them all. The result is entirely predictable: committees protect their turf, the bureaucracy defends its absolute control, and reform is reduced to the mere movement of files from one desk to another.

As established at the beginning of this text through Amal Chatterjee’s Prisoners of Empires, the cage these self-proclaimed stags are guarding stands firmly on five colonial pillars:

1. The Colonial Architecture of Property: Colonial authorities systematically dismantled traditional, communal land practices, replacing them with rigid, state-controlled title deeds designed solely to benefit a tiny elite and weaponize agriculture for cash-crop export rather than local sustenance. These deep structural frameworks remain untouched today, trapping the rural population in permanent cycles of poverty.

2. Resource Extraction and Mining: Chatterjee details how the legal and physical infrastructure for resource extraction was meticulously engineered to strip occupied nations of their natural wealth. Today, these exact structural arrangements are maintained through corrupt state-corporate deals, allowing multinational corporations and the domestic elite to exploit these legal loopholes, ensuring that the wealth from oil, gas, and minerals flies straight out of the country.

3. Export-Oriented Trade Networks: Rail lines, roads, and ports were never built to foster internal economic unity or local development; they were laid down as strict transit corridors to funnel raw wealth from the deep hinterlands directly to global markets. Post-colonial nations remain physically trapped in this one-way infrastructure, cutting off regional trade and forcing independent economies to remain entirely dependent on foreign corporate buyers.

4. Educational and Cultural Control: Colonial powers used education as a psychological weapon, eradicating indigenous knowledge systems to install an institutional curriculum designed to breed a Westernized local elite to run the empire. Decades after independence, this Eurocentric education system remains unchanged. By alienating students from their own heritage, it crushes critical domestic thinking and protects the power dynamics of the current ruling class.

5. The Moral and Legal Framework: This legal system was never designed to deliver justice; it was engineered to police the native population and secure foreign rule through draconian laws on public assembly and state secrecy aimed at crushing dissent. After independence, the domestic elite inherited this legislative machinery, using it strictly for their own self-preservation.

The path to breaking free from these colonial chains and this inherited captivity is entirely clear. We must first and foremost rid ourselves of this archaic education system, which produces nothing but uncritical conformists and mental slaves carrying superficial degrees instead of real knowledge. To break this colonial spell, we must enforce education in our national language, Urdu, alongside other regional languages, and bring the entire state machinery under the Urdu language.

Following that, we must fundamentally overhaul this system of governance, which runs on closed-door bargaining and the administrative theatre of donkeys rather than public welfare and radical transparency. Pakistan cannot progress through state secrecy and colonial laws; it requires a new governance architecture driven by open government, genuine native expertise, public evidence, and popular support. An Islamic welfare state can only progress upon democratic and divine principles. We have been suffering the consequences of these self-proclaimed stags and their sheer incompetence for eighty long years; one wonders when this system and its masters will finally learn.