Hypocrites, to boot

The Deep State goes on cruelly, following its own narrow ‘strategic’ policies that have all but destroyed our country.

I have added the appellation ‘hypocrites’ to the title of my piece of last week, for that is exactly what the commanders of the Deep State are. Lying; pretending; deceiving even their friends and well-wishers; trying to be too-clever-by-half; and when caught out, donning the robes of martyrs with holier-than-thou looks on their faces. As if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

Just look back over the years and see the lies and damned lies that we have been told, specially when the country has been led into catastrophes directly because of the Deep State’s own doings. If it was East Pakistan a half-century ago when that part of our country was treated like a colony and our Bengali compatriots like second and third-class citizens which moved them to hate West Pakistan (and its hapless people), it is Balochistan today where every second week broken and bashed and shot-through-the-heart bodies are dumped, making the Baloch hate the (yes, hapless) Punjabis.

Amid all of this, the Deep State goes on stupidly and blindly and cruelly, doing what it does best: ham-handedly following its own narrow and blinkered ‘strategic’ policies that have all but destroyed our country. Nothing demonstrates, yes I will say it again, this foolish cold heartedness than the fast-unravelling case of the Adiala Eleven for which kudos to My Lords the Chief Justices of Pakistan and of the KPK High Court.

Felicitations too, to Hamid Mir, for hosting two shows on the subject just two days apart, in which most heart-rending details of the tribulations of the families of the Eleven; the apparent murder, what else?, of four of them, and the death of the mother of one who has died and two who are still prisoners, came out in vivid and tortuous detail. I cannot say it any better than this report in this newspaper of record, of February 15, 2012:

“Within 24 hours of meeting her two children, previously ‘missing’ prisoners in the Adiala jail saga, Rohaifa, the petitioner in the shocking case, died of cardiac arrest on February 14. After a sleepless night following the meeting, 60-year-old Rohaifa developed heartache. She had earlier witnessed the disturbing sight of her sons, Abdul Majid and Abdul Basit, looking emaciated in tatters, with urine bags protruding out of their trousers. ‘She kept talking about Majid and Basit and was weeping since she returned after the meeting,’ said one of Rohaifa’s five sons, Abdul Shakoor. Three of them were among the 11 men who went missing from Adiala jail. They were later found in the custody of intelligence agencies. Rohaifa had already suffered an earlier heartbreak. Last month, of the 11 missing prisoners, four bodies were discovered in Peshawar. One of them was her other son, Abdul Saboor.”

While the death of Rohaifa Bibi is most upsetting, what shook me was what one of the small children of one of the prisoners who is still alive said on Mir’s first show, a day after he met his father at the Supreme Court. His father was a bag of bones the little eight or nine-year old boy said, due to the actions of these “beyghairat” (shameless, without honour) people. The hate and the rancour in the young lad was frightening to behold. What will he become when he grows up I asked myself with angry tears in my eyes too? A suicide bomber? A ‘jihadi’ intent on doing the greatest harm to whoever comes in his way, to avenge his father’s torture?

And who could blame him? Even the Honourable Chief Justice, a man who has seen it all in a long and distinguished career in the judiciary said that the sight of the prisoners invoked “the fear of God” in him! One report said the prisoners were kept in a room with no windows in the cold of Parachinar, with just the shirts on their backs. Another that all of them had blisters on their bodies. Still another that all were ill with various maladies principal among them renal failure.

For God’s sake what is going on, sirs? Are you not even answerable to the Almighty? Are these not His beings? Your lies about them being taken away by terrorists from Adiala have been exposed over and over again, and yet you have the gall to put the following on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlwiD4EILkE&feature=player_embedded

Come now, no feigning innocence: who else would have access to the information in the clip; the gruesome photographs? There is time even now. Give up your jihadi policies, rein in the ‘Tullis’ and the Hameed Guls and the Difaa-e-Pakistans, and mayhap our country will become normal again. And answer this one question: Why weren’t these people even charged in all the years they were in your custody?

P.S. If any of you, sirs, had an iota of decency you would resign, BMW 7-Series or not.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 17^th, 2012.