All is not well, Mr Shah

There is a desperate need for a bit of acerbic criticism, a dose of pessimism to ignite the nationalist fuse.

My last column apparently stirred up a hornets’ nest. People don’t like to hear bad things about their country. But there is a desperate need for an occasional bit of acerbic criticism and a dose of pessimism to shake the liver and ignite the nationalist fuse. I remember a time in the days before computers, cellphones and CLI, when a journalist had published an expose of a thriving racket which was defrauding the exchequer of a huge amount of money. He received two nasty phone calls for his efforts. The first caller invited the writer to choose the method that should be employed to terminate his temporal existence. The second, in the tart tones of repressed rage, made some rather indecent suggestions which had a primordial, bucolic base, before exploring various incestuous relations that he thought the journalist had been indulging in ever since he had his first biscuit. Well, that at least, was the gist of what he said. To cheer him up, I told him about the Italian author Giovannino Guareschi, who wrote The Little World of Don Camillo, which spawned a whole spate of French films starring Fernandel and Gino Cervi. It was, however, Guareschi’s introduction to his first book that gripped me. “The fascists are after me, the communists are after me, the church is after me, the government is after me. But I am determined to live, even if they kill me.” That’s what it’s all about, mate. Commitment. Nobody told us to take up this profession. We did it out of choice. Or perhaps necessity.

At a recent dinner, a businessman who represents a country which has a population less than that of North Nazimabad and who places his right hand over his heart whenever the national anthem is played at diplomatic functions, asked me why I haven’t migrated since I don’t think Pakistan had a future. Now I must make one thing absolutely clear. In spite of the incompetence and corruption of the leaders and the politicians, the ineptitude of the officials, the double standards of the clergy, the ambivalence of the army, the total lack of interest shown in coming to grips with the real issues that are mitigating against progress — I still love my country. I love the food, the people, the hospitality, the feeling of togetherness. But I don’t like the leaders and the sycophants that cluster around them. And I don’t like those hypocrites who pretend to be nationalists and carry ten-year visas and renewable airline tickets for self and family in their brief cases.

This brings me to that amiable and people-friendly chief minister of Sindh, Qaim Ali Shah and his blinkered staff who prepared the Four-Year Performance of the Sindh government. Now I don’t want to take anything away from Mr Shah. Karachi is an extremely difficult city to administer. However, the statistics that were presented essentially demonstrated improvements in the number of misdemeanours — mobile snatching, the arrest of targeted killers, the arrest or elimination of jihadi terrorists and dacoits, the fall in the number of people who have been kidnapped and an increase in the number of people arrested for bhatta. But not a word about the real issues — the alarming population growth, the absence of the rule of law, the nonexistence of appropriate punishment for acid throwers, shortage of water and energy crisis. Apparently these problems don’t exist for the army of local ministers who are cocooned in their cells. In fact, the way things are going, it looks as if they are going to be around a pretty long time.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2012.