Titanic success 

Letter November 11, 2016
For the sake of what’s left of the country, one is grateful for the intervention

KARACHI: I am all for the revolution that periodically promises to go beyond D Chowk. However, as tax paying citizen (a rare breed here) I, too, stayed in the comfort and safety of my drawing room urging my fellow ‘Burgers’ (conspicuous by their absence), the ‘Bunkababias’ and the ‘na roti-na kapra-na makan-na fikr awaam’, who formed the foot soldiers on a rampage. The media had a field day, egging on the unruly hordes towards another destructive and disastrous confrontation. We were assured that, like Brexit, this revolution would be a titanic success. And then, just like Boris Johnson’s gaffe, it sank abruptly leaving just the rumour mills spinning like cyclones.

Quite what possessed the Supreme Court to jump into the fray today, an exercise they assiduously avoided during the last abortive revolution and till now, is a matter of great discourse. For the sake of what’s left of the country, one is grateful for the intervention. Whatever the conclusion of the exercise, one just hopes they do not end up receiving the same flak that has hit the Crown High Court’s Brexit ruling, throwing the problem back into the lap of parliament, where it should have been handled a long time ago.

Apart from media hype and some politicians who must be, presumably free of sin and ready to cast the first stone, criticism of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif remains relatively muted. From their tax records and the occasional Election Commission release of assets, mostly at gross variance from their visible profiles, a significant number of our otherwise baying-for-blood leaders seem near worthy of charity. Unsurprisingly, they would hardly want what goes around to come around. Another good reason for Pakistan to keep lurching uncertainly into the future, with our leaders making mountains out of molehills; ignoring progressively deleterious manifestations of the ground reality, just in order to maintain the status quo.

Dr Mervyn Hosein

Published in The Express Tribune, November 12th, 2016.

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