What does one write about,
with so much having happened last week? The kidnapping
and death of the Chinese engineer by fiends in Muslim
clothing? The disgraceful performance of junior minister
Shahnaz Sheikh on a TV talk show? The general’s
uniform? What? Let’s talk of them all and worry
about the US presidential election till nearer the time,
not that it will make much difference to Muslim plight.
The Chinese say that investors are like pigeons: one fright
and they all fly off together. But they return one-by-one.
Our pigeons flew away when Nawaz Sharif froze foreign
currency accounts after his and Madam’s governments
had squandered and stolen $11 billion of private foreign
currency kept in the State Bank’s trust. September
11 didn’t help either, what with Pakistan perceived
as a terrorist-ridden state. Yet investors were beginning
to take another sniff at us after our phenomenal macro-economic
performance.
Why, we are about to bid adieu to the IMF, something inconceivable
when the Musharraf-Shaukat team arrived on the scene.
Now what are investors to make of the treatment of the
Chinese who are here to help our primitive tribals get
out of the age of Alexander and into civilisation? If
this is what we do to our best friends, what value others?
One has told the government time and again that demons
cannot be fought democratically and in full media glare,
when no such niceties impede the demons. You have to shut
off the country and wipe the demons off the face of the
earth. Is not that what you do to parasites, pests and
vermin? Of what use are the President’s and Prime
Minister’s condolences to the family of the dead
Chinese engineer?
He is gone, never to return, and for what? That he tried
to help build a dam to give our frozen-in-time primitives
water and electricity? Yet the media, the BBC especially,
repeatedly showed that one-legged maniacal leader of the
kidnapper’s gang making ablutions, praying and holding
forth, as if he is some God-fearing Muslim. If following
ritual makes a Muslim then it should be the easiest thing
in the world. But when primitive tribal customs supplant
Islamic injunctions it begs the question: are they really
Muslims? Are they just token adherents of God, his Book
and his Messenger or of illiterate mullahism?
Don’t they know that Islam finished tribalism? Yet
these guys hold un-Islamic tribal customs dearer than
the commands of God, taking great pride in usury, murder,
‘honour’ killings, giving sanctuary to criminals,
and terrorism which they justify as Jihad. They pollute
the name of Jihad. If the one-legged monster has a grouse
with the Americans because they incarcerated him in Guantanamo
Bay, why take it out on the Chinese? Where is the logic?
What’s so different then between him and the Zionists
who had a grouse with Hitler but took it out on the Palestinians?
These so-called Jihadis are the Zionists of Islam.
We talk of Islam yet here was a minister of this Islamic
republic of ours from the oppressed gender invading the
privacy of Chaudhry Nisar of the PML (N) on television.
Who is this woman? Is she an elected MNA or one of those
unelected sixty supposed to adorn our fake show-window
of gender equality? What is she doing in government? What
kind of a person can blame a mother for trying to get
her son out of jail? What kind of a person would hold
a son responsible for what his mother writes in confidence
to her President? Mother’s are programmed to protect
their children; you see that even in animals. Is Shahnaz
Sheikh a mother? Does she know what it feels like to have
a child incarcerated? When humans fall, they go below
the animal level. But two things are moot: one, why has
she not been thrown out of government, because her behaviour,
one presumes, should have embarrassed the Prime Minister,
and if it didn’t it should have, and, two, how come
she knows the contents of a letter written by a citizen
to her Head of State? The President’s office should
explain. Is nothing sacred? Are citizens to assume that
if they write to their President or Prime Minister, it
could become public knowledge. If so, then our rulers
are in graver danger of getting even more alienated, at
the mercy of intelligence agencies that bug people’s
homes, offices and phones and often feel no compunction
in telling irrelevant people what they have heard. Bug,
certainly, if that is in the national interest. Tell those
who are relevant what you discover. But how dare you provide
fodder for drawing room gossip! When people, especially
the intelligentsia and the rulers, lose the ability to
make the distinction between right and wrong, it signals
the fall of their nation.
The National Assembly passing the bill to allow the President
to continue as army chief was a foregone conclusion. Those
who are now shedding crocodile tears about the “death
of parliament” should ask themselves why the provision
to allow him to do so was there in the constitution in
the first place. What “death of parliament”
when it was stillborn, comprising only the losers of the
1970 elections who then framed a minority constitution
that they so revere?
If parliament and the constitution be their gods, and
even if parliament was not stillborn but born by Caesarean
section, was it not put to death by some of these very
parliamentarians when they passed the 15th Amendment in
1999 to make Nawaz Sharif an ‘elected’ dictator?
Where was their love for democracy, the constitution and
parliament then? Or is it that it is democratic for an
‘elected’ civilian to become dictator through
an act of parliament, but not for a soldier?
The bill doesn’t militate against the army chief’s
oath for two reasons: one, that a new law always supersedes
anything preceding it, and two, the sleight of hand of
the government’s lawyers is that the bill allows
the President to indulge in military affairs, not the
army chief to indulge in politics. In any case, if the
National Assembly passes a bill, what else is democracy?
Or does democracy only exist when they win; if they don’t,
it doesn’t.
They threaten to take out huge rallies opposing a president
in uniform, but are hiding behind the excuse of Ramadan
to put them off for a month, for they know that they cannot
attract even 2,000 people (remember the ‘million
man march’?). People won’t come out not because
they love Musharraf but because they have seen through
these hypocrite politicians. They don’t give a damn
whether the President is in uniform or not as long as
he gives them what the ‘democratically elected’
governments failed to for 11 years.
My sixth sense tells me not to rule out the possibility
of the President deciding to shed his uniform. That would
take all the wind out of the opposition’s sails.
They would be left adrift, rudderless, causeless. It would
be a coup to beat all coups. A commando gets people expecting
one thing and then goes and does another, like Shaukat
Aziz becoming prime minister while we were expecting others.
When has a uniform saved anyone anyway?
Ask Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq when you can, which will
be when you go to meet your Maker. It is not the uniform
that matters but the powers that come with it. Our President
is already Supreme Commander and Commander-in-Chief of
all three forces. All he has to do is take some powers
of the Chiefs of Staff of the army, navy and air force,
like the appointments of corps commanders, ISI and MI
chiefs etc. He would then be more immune from a coup,
but remain as exposed if he comes a cropper even if he
didn’t take those powers or was still in uniform.
But if he still must wear one, how about a field marshal’s,
five stars and all? I wouldn’t bet on it, but I
wouldn’t rule it out. My sixth sense tells me so.
