A more sobering conclusion is that the ideological battle being fought across Pakistan has now been won, hands down.
KARACHI: The victory sign and the joyous contempt on Sharukh Jatoi’s face on being sentenced to death summed up everything that is rotten in the state of Pakistan. Much water will flow under the bridge and considerably more detritus above before the final outcome. Assuming the unlikely, everybody except the family of the dead will happily have forgotten the case. By then, many more hundreds of good and innocent people will have been murdered over one pretext or the other. This is our grim reality. In our entire history, one would be hard pressed to find instances of terminal punitive justice being meted out to the privileged.
Barring a few hiccups and with the top brass and the present protegee seemingly caught unawares, the recent (s)elections threw up a predicted result with feudal-controlled rural Punjab and Sindh voting as serfs, Balochistan confirming Pakistani federalism as irrelevant and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) choosing the new boy on the block. Considering that much of K-P, as Karachi and Balochistan now are, is unlivable and no one cares, the rational explanation for the anti-drone vote is to let the other killers extend their mayhem unhindered. A more sobering conclusion is that the ideological battle being fought across Pakistan has now been won, hands down. The IP pipeline is already relegated to the dust pile. If further proof was needed for the still unconvinced, the recent destruction of Ziarat Residency and the current slaughter in Quetta are some further nails in the coffin. Then, there is festering Karachi, left to its fate and near terminal sickness.
We now hear that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) will join hands with other forces to form a credible opposition. While this could be to keep the rest on the straight and narrow, a less charitable explanation is that the PTI, self-avowed enemy of all that is evil, corrupt, wrong and drone related, will form a menage a trois to ensure it is not deprived of the remaining available spoils.
The precarious state of the union today is vividly depicted by two examples. The first is the collective wisdom of the Council of Islamic Ideology: that DNA or no DNA, rape does not exist in Pakistan since never will we have four happy non-rapist voyeurs directly urge their friend on before ratting on him. Second is a conundrum: was Waliur Rehman accused, among other atrocities, of the 2008 Marriott bombing, and recently drone-killed, Pakistan’s friend or enemy? A mainstream headline of The Express Tribune of June 16 poignantly sums up the effect of the carnage that takes place in the country almost daily: “Killing Hope and History”. What do our leaders have to say to that?
Dr Mervyn Hosein
Published in The Express Tribune, July 11th, 2013.
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