FIFTEEN years before August 1947, Winston Churchill said: `We have no intention

of casting away that most truly bright and precious jewel in the crown of the king,
which more than all our other dominions and dependencies constitutes the glory and
strength of the British empire.

We all know how it ended; this almost ides of August we mark the departure of the
British and the independence and creation of our very own Pakistan. As they left, the
British gathered up all the crowns they had collected from the myriad maharajas and
sultans they had encountered during their sojourn of two centuries and went back to
their island on the other side of the world. The crowns, literally, they kept and
arranged in glass cases in the carpeted rotunda of Windsor Castle, where they remain
today, the headgear of Bhopal and Tipu Sultan, the lined-up, once lustrous loot of
empire.

Pakistan`s was a special victory, a double rout, a one-up against the British and then a
wresting from what had been before empire; a new country whose existence and
possibility had been even less lil(ely, less imaginable, than the departure of the
British.

Imagined first by a poet as he longed for home in the frigid grimness of Europe,
Pakistan was a promise, a just-realised possibility whose allure lay in its emptiness.

Progressive writers, caught up in the feverish euphoria of the subcontinent`s grandest
anti-colonial moment, imagined it as a host for their literary aspirations, political
leaders as a playground for ideological innovation, a deftly devised polity of
democracy and faith leavened by linguistic and cultural diversity. Those that had the
least, who loaded up their oxcarts and left behind their fields, who rolled up their
bedrolls and remained undeterred by the unknown, had their own dreams idyllic
recreational patchworks of prosperity and new community, hopefully created.

Because Pakistan had just recently graduated from possibility to reality, it could hold
them all, these vastly varied dreams of a perfect homeland, all fit into the receptacle of
its newly created borders. Pakistan was a promise and in its unrealisedcapacities
everyone could believe.

So many of our current wars and vagaries are due to the collisions of these varied
promises, all of whom existed together for a time but have now decided against
cohabitation. There are the promises of constitutions past, pushing and shoving at the
content of amendments present. There are the memories of one vision of the nation,
promoted by the sayings and writings and remembrances of leaders past and the
competing recollections of others also bolstered by bits and pieces of the past.

One by one, those that lived then, when the magic moment of creation happened, are
beingtaken away by time; and with them go the empirical truths of what was said,
what little was certain, and what was meant to be. In its wake, Pakistan is today a
battleground of varied dreams, a warzone of parallel promises, each of which yearns
for fulfilment.

The problem, however, is not simply the competing content of promises differently
remembered, or even the grisly contest of irreconcilable visions. A nation built on
promises is not a problem; indeed, every nation, even those that count themselves as
the strongest, most cohesive and dominant of our contemporary times, can claim that
germ as the first act of creation. With crowds gathered in the streets, cities sealed and
marches pledged on the eve of its 67th birthday, Pakistan`s problem with promise is
not its inability to decide which ones it wants fulfilled.

Instead, it is an addiction to a particular stage ofpolitical existence, the point of
promise at which anything is possible, nothing is certain, and passion determines
everything. The rage in the streets, the brokenness ofjustice,theincredible allure ofa
different future attached to a new promise thus tempts and taints each time.

As Pakistanis, we can believe in promises but we cannot live through the pain of their
realisation, the mediocrity of the path that must be taken to fruition,the banalities
thatensue afterthefervour subsides. Even the content of the commitment does not seem
to matter, for with every crisis and there are so many and so frequent a crowd of
diehards appears, its faith invested, its flags raised for the most recent promise for
something new.

It is not, then, a contest of promises, a rout to see whether it will be the military or the
civilian leadership, the few secularists or the many populists.

The question is not one of who will define the future but that as a country Pakistan
will remain addicted to the possibility that is promised, yet never have the patience or
perseverance to see a vision any vision realised.

Behind us, in the 67 years that have gone before, lies the collective carnage, the
discarded detritus of promises past. In front of us are the promises we accept today but
will no longer be able to tolerate tomorrow.

A move towards political maturity requires patience and process, and in Pakistan`s
promisefilled present and promise-filled past neither seems to be forthcoming.

The 67th birthday, like the 66th that came before and the 68th that will come after,
will bring the passion and tumult of upheaval, a call to believe in one man`s vision
and to join another man`s march.

The rulers of the present will thwart the rulers of thefuture,each detailing the realills
and travails of a country stuck in a single stage of existence, unwilling to grow, earn,
work, or live out the promisesitsentencestoyesterday.m The writer is an attomey
teaching constitutional law and political philosophy