The other party which recently came into the limelight by exercising its own brand of political high jinks is the Pakistan Muslim League of the Chaudhry Brothers. Its leaders probably felt they hadn’t hogged the limelight for some time and thought that by threatening to pull out of the coalition they would score a point and gain a measure of popularity. And then they went and executed a somersault and informed the president that they wanted once again to return to the bosom of the politburo. The action of the leadership demonstrated that the Q League is a party bereft of principle, torque, guts or momentum. The party is essentially composed of a loosely-banded group of turncoats who were cobbled together by former dictator Pervez Musharraf after spiriting them away from the leadership of Nawaz Sharif. In essence they are bigoted, retrogressive and quintessentially hidebound in thought and deed. When they fronted for President Musharraf the PPP was the enemy. Can President Zardari trust such a group?
The bad news is that the country will be lumbered for another year with a federal government that doesn’t govern, a president who has become the Swiss Army knife of character thespians, a prime minister who after four years in harness still hasn’t a clue on how to come to come to grips with the energy crisis, a military whose actions the Americans are finding increasingly arcane and inscrutable and an administration that is deaf to the entreaties of women who are repeatedly ravished by sexually predatory vacuous landlords in an environment where police are reluctant to register even First Information Reports.
It doesn’t always have to be like this. All it really needs is one honest, down-to-earth leader at the top who puts country before self, who can distinguish right from wrong, who reintroduces and implements the rule of law, who carries out the judgments of the apex court and who is not afraid to die for a cause. One is sick of Pakistani presidents and prime ministers who feel they have to reside in palatial splendour, cruise in the largest and most expensive limousines and who, when they travel abroad, feel they have to take along full airplane-loads of sycophants who are housed in five-star hotels and paid 500 dollars a day for shopping. The PPP is supposed to be the voice of the people, and the manifesto of the party was based on the principles of socialism, though the sartorial elegance of Pakistan’s current prime minister would belie the fact.
There is no disgrace in simplicity, after all some of the world’s great personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Chou-en-Lai, Ho Chi Minh and Nelson Mandela were essentially simple people who lived in the most rudimentary conditions. Why can’t the PPP leaders who represent a party that was crafted along socialist lines start to behave like liberals instead of Arab princes?
Published in The Express Tribune, October 9th, 2011.
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"Why can’t the PPP leaders who represent a party that was crafted along socialist lines start to behave like liberals instead of Arab princes?" They have to behave like Arab princes because they think the masses will not respect them if they dress like peasants. Even ZAB, the hypocrite, was considered to be one of the world's best-dressed men. As to taking sycophants along with them on foreign trips, and wasting the nation's wealth on this and other activities, they think that public money belongs to them, they can do whatever they want with it (including putting it into their own Swiss bank accounts). The reason we're losing the war on terrorism is only that while the terrorist is willing to sacrifice whatever little he has, our leaders are concerned only with collecting as much wealth as possible.