We shoot defenceless women don’t we — and other stories

Horrors such as Sister Bargeeta’s murder, remind us that this killing is another nail in coffin of civilised Pakistan.

First about Sister Birgitta (known to her flock as Sister Bargeeta) Almeby, the 70-year-old Swedish missionary and charity worker, who for 38 years served the underprivileged and the dispossessed; the target of bigots and hate-filled religious extremists: poor Christians. Sister was shot in the neck and chest in Lahore on December 12 and died in a Stockholm hospital days later.

The chivalrous perpetrators of this horrid crime must be so proud of shooting an old and defenceless woman whose only crime was that she looked after those at the bottom of the Pakistani pile; and their orphans and their sick; the poor of the poor of Youhanabad. And who also ran an adult literacy centre to improve the lot of those left by the wayside by an increasingly bigoted and unfeeling state. More than anything else, the braves must feel elated that they have killed another kafir and have further purified the Land of the Pure.

For all the good work that she did, Sister Bargeeta must be in heaven by the grace of the Almighty: this is just to beg her and her loved one’s forgiveness for the pain she went through in the days after her shooting as she struggled to hold on to her beautiful life, and to send my heartfelt condolences to all those left uncared for and alone in this increasingly ugly and vicious and cruel country. There is not much more anyone can say about a horror such as Sister Bargeeta’s cold-hearted and sickening murder, except to remind ourselves that this wanton killing is another nail in the coffin of a civilised Pakistan.

As if to say the great men of Lahore who killed an innocent, and may I say it again, defenceless woman are not the only gallants around, their brothers-in-arms in Karachi killed five women dispensing anti-polio vaccine days after Sister’s sad death; those in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, one in Peshawar (a 14-year-old volunteer), and a woman supervising the anti-polio campaign in Charsadda — and for good measure her driver, too. By the by, the World Health Organisation has stopped polio immunisation in Pakistan forthwith. We should not be surprised if Pakistanis are now not welcome in other countries for fear that any of us might be carrying the polio virus.

Amid all of this mayhem, Twitter is humming with rumours that extensions in service will be given to some powerful players including in the army and judiciary; a government of  ‘technocrats’ (who have failed this country repeatedly, kindly note) will be engineered in; and elections will be postponed for a year. Does this not dovetail neatly with the recent ‘revelations’ of the NAB Chairman, Admiral (retd) Fasih Bokhari?

Whatever in the world has got into the man? On December 13, he says there is ‘corruption’ of Rs7 billion every day in the country; exactly one day later and abracadabra, that figure becomes Rs12 billion a day. Neither was this the end of it: two days after this shemozzle, we are worst confounded when a NAB ‘spokesman’ tells us that 65 per cent of this corruption is done in Punjab. I ask you!

What magic wand did Bokhari wave, what dream did he dream, that all was revealed unto him? Or did he read Harry Potter and intone ‘Specialis Revelio’ which causes something to reveal its innermost secrets? He must tell us the magic with the help of which he got his figures and also explain why they changed so drastically upwards inside of 24 hours?

The admiral not only sounds ‘at sea’ (pun intended), he looks it, too. Did some ‘movers and shakers’ in his organisation feed him these figures or was he merely spouting someone else’s without giving a single thought to how silly he would look when people turned these outlandish sums over in their heads? The admiral must immediately clarify the details of his accusations. For if he does not make a full accounting, people would be justified in thinking that this is all part of above ‘conspiracy’.

Let’s look at this another way. As an editorial or two, and several op-eds in various newspapers (which I am sure have been ‘put-up’ to the admiral by my friend Shaukat Qadir) have suggested, not only are the figures mind-boggling, the ‘timing’ of the ‘revelation’ is most curious, too. Add to that the fact that only the federal and Punjab governments have been named by the admiral and you get the drift of what I am saying. I mean, the elections are mere months away, so is this an insidious, nay brazen, attempt to favour a particular party (wink, wink)? The admiral trying to fill ‘spymaster’ Pasha’s ill-fitting shoes, eh what?

Seriously, how possibly can Bokhari conflate electricity theft and crooks not paying income taxes, to corruption committed by governments? I am not saying all the people in government are angels, but Rs12 billion a bloody day? Fifty billion dollars a year? Poppycock!

A word or two about the infamous tattoo(s) found on the Peshawar airport terrorist(s): so what if one or all of them had tattoos? They could have been hardened criminals on the run from one of Russia’s gulags; they could have once been gang members. What is the problem here? Who has ever accused the TTP of being angelic?

Finally, it is rather rich of the shadowy ‘security official’ to accuse the civilian governments of not taking ownership of the War on Terror when the army arrogates to itself all decision-making on this matter. As we well know, it only turns to parliament when caught in a tight spot such as Osama bin Laden’s discovery and killing in Kakul.

Let me say in the end that most of the chickens hatched by the Deep State are home and roosting nicely, thank you very much. If COAS Kayani and DG ISI Islam do not even now live up to their reputations of being 28 and 52 on Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful people and root out the evil of terrorism from this poor country, we, and they, are done for.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 21^st, 2012.