It is an irony that on the 34th anniversary of our great independence we were to put up with the platitudes repeated ad infinitum by the wielders of state power and the claims which ring hollow even with their utterances. The wielders of power invariably consider the public at the most a bunch of morons who could be fed with anything shoveled through their throats.

However, the claims of indispensability often signals the beginning of the end. It can be remembered that a powerful Ayub era came crashing down when the regime started celebrating its 'decade of development'. The development is often misconstrued in Third World country where it is at the most the repairing of a culvert or the building of a stretch of road. Yet in accomplishing those paltry patch works of development things are mired in sleaze and graft. But for the wielder of power it is a great feat of development if some part of the project is rescued.

The development has, on the otherhand, a civilizational connotation. They progress in tandem with each other towards a common consequence. In the developed west they came along the path of renaissance, enlightenment and a string of discoveries. Do we at all conceive that kind of development or are we in the fringes of such civilisational development? What a joke hearing about the politics of development before we conceptually understand it.

The production is intricately linked with the development of industrial backup. Even if we inherited some of them we were incapable of running them efficiently. Because they also require multiple other sources of backup Our production, therefore, stops at the best in multiplying our population in an over-populated country. There is, however, a scope for developing even the human resources which can indeed be turned into an asset. But the performance provided by the agencies concerned show that achievements even there are disappointing.

The impression was somehow been created that the development and production are the alliances' forte and indeed the twin pillars of the regime's singular achievement. But the myth, if any, in this regard is since exploded as the country inexorably slides more and more towards stark poverty. The trend could have perhaps been arrested by a measure of austerity and with grip over the country's financial management: minimising overhead costs and by trimming an unwieldy administration and jumbo cabinet which is still there or by reining in reckless corruption. The ideas were of no avail to a bunch of consumption oriented hedonistic people at the helm. As the nation's ailments are not remedied the poverty, hunger and disease rage in full fury in the paradise of development and production where there's supposed to be flow of milk together with honey.

So far, so good. But how has our celebration of Independence gone? Apart from celebration it is also a day for retrospection, soul searching and taking stock. While taking stock of 34 years of independence the balance sheet was as before found in red. Even if our souls are preserved by the stroke of fortune, the soul of the nation is desecrated. And the introspection throws open a plethora of angsts to torment our heart and deep wounds to suffer from its anguish.

By taking away some of the glorious features of our past marking the finest moments of our independence struggle from the celebration what it produced was a faceless deity out of our glorious history. Alas! Our upcoming generation will never know the heroes to whom we owe so much for our emancipation. They will never know the sacrifices of those unknown fighters destined to be in obscurity forever. Instead the stories were woven only to shift the focus elsewhere to obfuscate the hero central to independence, our history and everything else.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.