Get Real

OCTOBER 2000 - A year after he was deposed, Mian Sahib still seems to have seen no light at all. If his letter to the nation is anything to go by, he and his advisers seem convinced that good, wholesome and lurid purple prose can still work wonders. Since the people are by and large idiots, a good rousing speech with dramatic imagery thrown in, will paper over whatever cracks are visible and keep the people from ever getting to see the real picture.

‘Be a witness, countrymen’ apart from being grammatically wrong, is rightly translated from the original Urdu. It is difficult to imagine if the piece could have been written in English with the same ‘effect’. Mian Sahib’s speech writers haven’t changed, it is obvious. The same florid and theatrical style that used to be the hallmark of Mian’s speeches is very much in bloom in the letter from Attock, undoubtedly compiled in Lahore. Expressions like ‘dark of the night’ – actually it was not. Around 6 pm the light is pretty good, ‘shadow of guns’ – again the 20 men who clambered over PTV’s gates and more or less sealed Mian’s fate, were not armed like Arnold Swaznegger. There were a few guns but none were casting any shadows. Democracy was ‘uprooted,’ which is hard to believe since we all know it was never planted in the first place. What was portrayed as democracy was anything but. True some of the fattest men in Pakistan regularly met in large halls and imagined they were legislators deliberating over the great future of their people. But that was more or less it. They were more punctual in absenting themselves from the boring sessions or were simply asleep. All decisions were therefore taken without debate and inside plush drawing rooms, (which is the way it’s always been). Laws were passed, verdicts determined and actions taken without going through the tedium of democratic discourse. So what was ‘uprooted’ was neither a sapling and certainly not a tree. It was a coarse and mangy bush and not the great oak that is being lamented about. The sight of a swagger stick in its place is just as sickening, but we are the ones who have planted it. Again.

The purple letter goes on. It talks of ‘rank cruelty’, ‘cold dungeon’, ‘scepter of solitary confinement’, ‘excruciating loneliness’, ‘thwart the doctrine of rule’ – that one is a real masterpiece, ‘sky high walls of the fort,’ – that is not true. The Attock fort walls are formidable and even propelled with the power of purple prose, difficult to scale, but they are not sky high. In fact, there is a clear distinction between the top of the walls and the sky which is several times higher. The letter wails about ‘propaganda with loud fanfare’ – (is it without fanfare ever ?) and ‘character assassination’ but makes no mention of the reams of papers that contain details of doling out plots, favours, concessions and hundreds of instances where all rules were flouted to accommodate friends and personal businesses at the cost of national interest, fair play or ethical practices. Nowhere in the long and boring letter does the ex-PM or more accurately his letter writer – surely we all know the last thing Mian Sahib liked to use was a pen and paper unless he was throwing away state assets or signing deposit slips for remittances abroad, does a single detail show up. There are no facts or figures, just dark purple prose of a low grade.

Mian Sahib’s ‘crime’ of making us the ‘first Islamic nuclear power’ has brought in its wake ‘showers of blessings’ - to borrow from the vocabulary of the writer and we all, who have been taking showers under these bounties since then, are indeed proud to have become the first nuclear something, something. It was policies of such misplaced grandeur that have reduced this poor country to the status of an international beggar turned away at every door – to use more of Mian Sahib’s imagery. What good the Chagai fire cracker did us we all know and if Mian Sahib is the architect of this grand design then he can keep the glory. We only want to improve our lives and live with some dignity. The nuclear adventure provided neither. Nuclear power one day, beggars the next. Some vision.

Although Mian Sahib declares that when he was in power, he ‘cared a fig for anyone in the world’ I still can’t work that one out. Firstly, he was not into figs. Had he said, ‘fried sparrows’ I would have bought it. Even ‘harissa’ would have convinced me that our leader was not kidding and was sending out a powerful and hot-spiced message to the world to stop fooling about with the nuclear power to end all powers. Towards the merciful end of the very, very long letter, Mian Sahib’s ghost writer really gets carried away – we have not been able to determine precisely who was the gentleman who performed this act of kindness and talks of electricity becoming ‘a bolt from the blue’, ‘the last morsel of food has been snatched from the poor’ and finally, ‘the country has reached the edge of the precipice.’ There. Electricity and bolt from the blue is more or less the same thing and how it can strike anybody in Pakistan is beyond comprehension, seeing that getting it from one house to another is hard enough for WAPDA (Wanted Army Personnel Dead or Alive).

As for the morsel bit, the poor had little even when Mian was running the shop. His reign is not exactly Pakistan’s golden chapter and the yearning running through the letter for those balmy days is one more insult to the poor people of Pakistan whose only fault is that they are a forgiving and now, resigned-to-their-fate people. For them it matters little whether the Khakis, the Mians or the Bhuttos are calling the shots. It is hard times always – only the degree of pain increases with each year. That petrol prices have been ‘revised’ four times in a year (not to worry, the new boys tell us. It doesn’t affect the common man !), the dollar costs an obscene amount of money and there is just as much killing, murdering and looting going on as before (Moin Haider is very concerned) and Pakistan have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (more purple prose here) in Kenya, only proves that the people of Pakistan are up S. creek without a paddle and without a hope.

The ‘hands of Mian Nawaz Sharif’ are clean says the letter. It’s the feet we are all worried about. Get real Mian Sahib and the party with more splinters than a broken tea pot. You had a great opportunity to do something for the wretched of this land whose only fault is that they were born here. You blew it, all of you, from the fat feudals to the puny intellectuals to the shady businessmen to the conniving judges and the prostrate bureaucrats. What we are suffering today is entirely because you didn’t deserve this country. We did perhaps, but we have no voice, not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow.