The writing on the wall

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has stumbled and talked about a broader coalition with the MQM, JUI and Q-League.

The first person, in recorded history, to have seen the writing on the wall was King Belshazzar, when the disembodied fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the wall of the royal palace and foretold the demise of the Babylonian Empire. It’s all there in the Biblical Book of Daniel. Apparently the king, in a highly advanced state of inebriation, was gloating over the sacred golden and silver vessels which had been removed from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar. However, the country that holds the world record for writings on the wall is not old Mesopotamia but Pakistan, where this phrase has been perennially popping up during the last 64 years every time a government is halfway through its term. The exceptions were during the Ayub and Zia years.

However, most people are familiar with the writings on the walls of government and private buildings. These are the ones where real democracy is at work, and not in the assemblies where a bill to increase military expenditure by 20 per cent can be passed in 10 minutes, while the debate on the meaning of obscenity could go on for a week with profound arguments on both sides. And then there is, of course, the graffiti — the true, grim, brain-melting scribbles where references to policy are at times exploited with cunning irony and can be pillow-bitingly embarrassing.

‘The writing on the wall’ has competed for attention with ‘the hidden hand’, which apparently was once responsible for all the problems of the city, and was, according to politicians, variously fuelled and propelled by a consortium of agencies formed by the Mossad, RAW, the CIA, the former KGB, MI5 and, of course, the ISI. But, in recent times, the hand has remained well and truly hidden. Now that the writing is once again on the wall for, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has stumbled off like the Flying Dutchman and talked about a broader coalition with the MQM, the JUI and, wait for it, the Q-League of the Chaudhry brothers. As the public memory is short, it would be a good idea to remind readers that this is the party that produced those skin-crawlingly unpleasant polymaths that hectored and browbeat the employees of a TV news channel and gifted to the nation a speaker who wanted an office that rivaled that of the president, bought a 10-million-rupee limousine at the taxpayer’s expense, and carted off hundreds of freeloading MNAs to pleasure jaunts in Switzerland.

The JUI would make a good partner because it is led by Pakistan’s shrewdest and most pragmatic politician. One can’t think of another person in this blighted republic that has a charge of treason against him one day and ends up as a contender for the premiership the next. The MQM’s alliance is a little difficult to understand. It is essentially a secular party which is strongly opposed to feudalism. But then, politics makes strange bedfellows.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 25^th, 2011.