End of the Pumpkin

OCTOBER 1999 - So the heavy mandate has sunk without a trace. It took a little over two hours to polish off the government in Islamabad and considering that the entire paraphernalia of the State was in the hands of the PML, their swift expiry will remain a matter of debate and speculation for a long time. In its final fall, the government reflected its most outstanding feature – incompetence. It took 20 jawans just about as much time as it takes to polish off a plate of harissa, to possess PTV, the most beloved organ (for want of a better word) of the government. Of the Nawabshah caper and the Tom Clancy antics in the Karachi airport control tower, the theatre of the absurd was at its very best. In fact it would be downright funny had it not been so serious an act. What were the brainy people running the shop in Islamabad thinking of? Had they completely lost their marbles? These are questions with very simple answers, as we all know.

In Pakistan, when things start to go bad the people seek refuge in jokes. Over the last year, the jokes had continued to flow down the grapevine. The one about the two brothers walking their dog in London, the one about them dining in a western restaurant and the one about Nawaz entering a donkey in a race, all surfaced and passed from hand to hand. It was one way the people were expressing their disgust and it wasn’t too different when the now-awakened Messiah of good governance, Ms Bhutto and her spouse were plundering the country at will. In Islamabad, contrary to whatever happens in the country, it has always been business as usual. Every ruler surrounded by supplicating sycophants, greasy business slime balls and gun-toting bulldogs has held the nation hostage. Every whim and every imaginary insult is executed without any thought of right or wrong. The sad fact is that in Islamabad, with all that marijuana growing wild, the rulers and their lackeys get stoned and stay stoned. What other explanation can there be? Even a herd of half-wits would have seen the writing on the wall, provided of course someone had taken them to the wall. In Mushahid Sahib’s 9 pm act of daily brilliance, the world was perfect as seen from Islamabad. In the end, the media couldn’t save its great expert. The media is the message is one of the truths we occasionally remind ourselves about. Obviously there was no time for such nonsense.

In the coming months, there will be reams written about how the heavy mandate throttled the country and then sank itself. In fact some would say that it never was very heavy. A mere 33% turned up to vote that year and 45% of that lot gave the thumbs up to the PML. In the context of the numbers Pakistan has, this was a very small mandate but so disgusted were the people with the princess of democracy, that even Nawaz Sharif looked like a vision in white. Last night, PTV in its 9 pm news called him Nawaz Sharif and it took a while to remember whom they were talking about. All we could remember from the hammering of two years and more was ‘WazireAzamMianMohammadNawazSharif nayfarmaya’. Now it can’t even be, ‘the former Prime Minister.’ Is there a lesson here? Yes, but only if you are prepared to learn and we all know in Islamabad the first lesson you learn is to forget. You also make sure that you pay no heed to any rules or have any respect for the written word. The government that ran the show ran it with mobile phones, red phones, green phones and phones of every other colour. They sat on sofas in the evenings and took snap decisions on any issues that they chose. Formal discussions, deliberations and other such silly procedures that are followed by other dull governments around the globe, were of no consequence. If the National Assembly was a joke – a fat one at that, it was very much in the tradition of the PML to relegate it to the rubbish bin where they wanted it to stay. That was the style or ‘good governance’ as the Minister for Information put it. As the performance slipped further and further, I chanced to read the election manifesto and after the first two pages decided that it was insulting to read on. In the end, Mr. Naji’s slogans, for that is what the Chairman Academy of Letters (ye gods!) – a slogan maker, could not save his beloved government.

Every thing in Pakistan has always been in the future tense. Now it is a tense future as well. We are not even back to square one, but somewhere below that. Another two and a half years have been frittered away and democracy’s received a kick up its backside again. Bad democracy should lead to more democracy but even this principle has to have some limits. What kind of sick system do we have which only throws up retards and imbeciles every time we go to the polls? It requires a dozen good men and women to run this country. People here hold many, many jobs, which are twice as tough as running the government, but all we have are crooks disguised as leaders, determined to succeed at all costs. Even if a dozen good people will do, where are we going to find them? Can we put in an SOS with the Maker and ask him to beam down a dozen of his best angels, sort of celestial caretakers? He may agree, but we cannot guarantee what condition they will be in by the time we are finished with them. In fact they may find it hard to get admitted up there, because there is so much slime here in the land of the pure. Getting power in Pakistan is easy as the army has demonstrated, but running this wacky ship is another ball game. Maybe even angels will fear to tread here and when you consider that there is nothing that remains intact anymore who can blame the angels for folding their wings and refusing to float down here.

As for the poor people of Pakistan whose only fault is that they live here, the coming months are going to mean more punishment and more sacrifices. The simple truth is, we are broke and we are rudderless and we are at the crossroads once again. In fact I have a nagging suspicion, we never ever left the crossroads.