Digging our graves.

Byline: F.S. Aijazuddin

BY now, we all know what to expect if any one of us is infected with Covid-19. But what can one do when a nation is itself afflicted? Pakistan has an advanced, institutional form of Covid-19. It can no longer smell corruption, has lost the taste for freedom, is unable to breathe the air of civil liberty, and all too often expectorates untruths. Nothing can mask the reality of its condition.

Covid-19 has spread, as paralysis does, gradually. It has travelled across continents, like some asylum seeker, unmarked, unwelcome. Nations with responsive, responsible governments have been able to grapple with this unforeseen challenge. Those with lame leadership lag steps behind this menace.

Over the centuries, such pandemics have spawned their own historians. The 10 plagues of Egypt (including locusts) were chronicled in the Bible. The pestilence in 1585 that attacked 16th-century France had essayist Michel de Montaigne record his experiences in horrific detail. And less than 100 years later, the London plague of 1665-66 found its voice in Daniel Defoe, who survived the attack that decimated one quarter of London's population. Over 100,000 persons died.

The buffoonery of many leaders is disquieting.

Defoe's account was published in 1722 as A Journal of the Plague Year. It begins with a bland detachment that mirrors our modern experience: 'It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.'

A lockdown was ordered by London's authorities. Theatres were closed down, gaming houses locked, shops sealed. Imprisoned within their homes, 'the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenances even of the common people. Death was before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their graves, not of mirth and diversions.'

Actually, Daniel Defoe was only five years old when the plague struck London, too young to remember its impact in any detail. He relied on the...