Derailed

For his call for murder, removing Bilour from his ministerial position would be a start.

At first, it seemed as if the railway carriage of his mind had finally derailed. But then, I considered the possibility that the last movie Ghulam Ahmad Bilour had seen in his cinema may have been Vaastav or Gangs of Waseypur. That would explain his placing a supari (bounty) on the head of the imbecilic ‘Sam Bacile’: he was just channelling his inner Mumbai ka Bhai, after all.

Of course, it turns out that he was just trying to save his skin. Still, self-preservation, despite having a hyphen and multiple syllables, is too small a term to describe the motivation for a prominent Awami National Party (ANP) leader to make common cause with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and al Qaeda. When it comes to strange bedfellows, you’d be hard put to find odder couples than these.

The ANP, after all, has suffered more casualties at the hands of the TTP and their al Qaeda allies than any other political party in Pakistan. Those ‘brothers’ that he called upon for help have gleefully slaughtered hundreds of ANP workers from Khyber to Karachi and have tried several times to kill ANP leaders as well. Mian Iftikhar’s only son was one of their victims and ANP chief Asfandiyar Wali Khan only barely escaped assassination himself.

On the ANP website, you’ll find lists of victims, each name representing not just a lost life, but an entire family destroyed; a generation scarred and traumatised at the hands of vicious murderers who use the cloak of piety to cover their bloodlust. Those murderers are now Bilour’s best buddies and by seeking their aid and approval, he has essentially spit upon the graves of the ANP’s many martyrs.

While it’s clear that Bilour used the rhetoric of the TTP simply because he does not want to be counted among those martyrs, there may be another reason as well. The answer to that lies in a question: why would an ANP leader, whose party won largely because it positioned itself as an alternative to the MMA, use language that even the constituent parties of that erstwhile alliance have shied away from? The clue is in Bilour’s claim that public opinion backs his calling for murder. By positioning himself to the right of the political right, he is hedging his electoral bets by appealing to those voters, who are not his traditional supporters. Essentially, along with saving his skin, he hopes to save his seat as well.

And why not? Capitulation is, after all, the order of the day. If the PPP, which has more reason than most to oppose obscurantists and extremists, can cave in to the extent of declaring a public holiday in order to (unsuccessfully) appease those very extremists, then who can fault Bilour for going a step further? If it’s good enough for Big Brother, then it’s certainly good enough for Bilour. You can even look at this as a ‘bounty’ful version of Shahbaz Sharif’s now infamous ‘don’t kill us, we’re just like you’ speech if you’re uncomfortable with solely blaming the PPP.

Granted, the ANP has ‘distanced’ itself from Bilour’s call for murder and Bushra Gauhar has gone so far as to call it a “criminal act”. This is all well and good, but if the ANP has an iota of sense, or a long-term plan that goes beyond muddling through another few months, it had best make sure that the man who has insulted the memory of its shaheeds does not go unpunished. Removing him from his ministerial position would be a start, but surely the blood of massacred ANP cadres demands the cancellation of his party membership as well.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 28^th, 2012.