Taking revenge

This has certainly not been President Zardari’s fortnight. Not by a long shot. He has had a shoe thrown at him in Birmingham. He has been compared to Mir Jaffer, the stooge that the British installed after ousting the Muslim hero of Bengal Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah.

He has been criticised both at home and abroad for calling on three heads of state, one of whom had earlier delivered a right royal snub in a country with whom Pakistan doesn’t enjoy the best of relations — and all this while half of the north-west frontier was covered by three feet of water. But those who stand by him, and the number appears to be dwindling, know that Mr Zardari will bounce back. He has a great deal of resilience and an uncanny sense of survival.

A few months ago when everything was hunky dory, he had this irresistible urge to come up with an occasional one-liner, and there is every possibility that he might after searching in his verbal arsenal repeat that deadpan pronouncement about democracy being the best revenge. He doesn’t really have many other options.

The recent banning of a local channel notwithstanding, there can be little doubt that today the media still has considerably more freedom than it did during the dying days of the Q League. Remember when, as a last gasp, the goons of the ruling party hectored, bullied and browbeat the workers of the same news channel. It was a demonstration of the most abject oppression, and lived on in the flickering ethereal Valhalla of television legend. Even the self-appointed spokesman of the government at the time, the jocular Sheikh Rashid Ahmed with the two-stroke voice, was at a loss for words.

Coming back to the one-liner about democracy being the best revenge, it is not very clear against whom Mr Zardari was taking revenge. When he tossed his epigram into the stratosphere in his usual, grim, brain-melting smiley fashion, was he thinking of Ayub and the 20 families, Yahya, Zia, Musharraf, or the whole short-back-and-sides and spit-and-polish clan? Or was the jibe directed against the people?

How else can one explain the fact that the prices of milk, wheat flour and sugar, the staple fare of the common man, are 14, 18,  and 49 rupees per unit more expensive than they were during the period of the last dictatorship, and that the price of petrol skyrocketed from 45 rupees to 71 rupees a litre ?

This is not to suggest that the man at the top has not been doing his bit for posterity. The passing of the bill making the harassment of women in the workplace a crime is a case in point. And there have been other achievements that the PPP government has chalked up. But regrettably and most unfortunately, the government won’t touch the utilities with a barge pole.

Electricity now costs 11 rupees a unit and the price is supposed to increase after every few months as directed by policies outlined by the IMF. It is common knowledge that Iran has offered to provide Pakistan electricity at 1.18 rupees a unit, and China has offered to provide an unlimited amount of electricity at 300 rupees per month per household. Isn’t it time somebody in the government took notice?

Published in The Express Tribune, August 25^th, 2010.