The Commando scarpers!

His conduct recalled to mind elegant way in which Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suffered at the hands of another army dictator.

I’d written my article last night and was about to email it to my editor this morning when news came in of the Commando fleeing from the Islamabad High Court when his bail was cancelled! I don’t mind telling you I fell off my chair laughing.

Not too much of a Commando, what? His conduct recalled to mind the elegant way in which Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suffered at the hands of another army dictator, even going to the gallows eventually.

On August 18, 2009 I wrote in Dawn: “My advice to the Commando will be to come back to the country and face the music like a man. He has badmouthed ZAB much, and far too frequently when he ruled the roost, once going to the extent of calling him “the worst thing to have happened to Pakistan”! Well, let us see if he is half the man that Bhutto was.” He isn’t, is he?

I went on: “Let’s not forget the tribulations of another elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who was thrown out of office by the army acting at the behest of the Commando and his rufaqaa and then, quite disgracefully, locked up in Attock Fort before being taken in shackles and chains to Karachi to stand trial for that so-called hijacking which many today say was a fraud played out by the ‘agencies’ to provide grounds for the removal of a constitutional government.” And the Commando himself scarpers when threatened with arrest?

So then, mayhem escalates in the Citadel of Islam, the good Taliban suicide-bombing the ANP day in and day out, and killing MQM candidates as far south as Hyderabad; the tally after the caretakers took over a few days ago, rising to over 60 dead and countless others maimed for life. In Peshawar’s bombing targeting the Bilours, even children were killed.

But thank God for little mercies: the gracious spokesman for the TTP apologised to Ghulam Ahmad Bilour for his getting hurt in the bombing in Yakatoot, Peshawar, saying they had no intention of harming him; that their target was his nephew Haroon Bilour, son of the late Bashir Bilour who the TTP blew up some months ago. By God, the brass of these murdering terrorists.

Earlier that day, in Balochistan, the PML-N’s Sardar Sanaullah Zehri’s convoy came under IED attack, killing his son, brother and nephew, and their guard. Amid all this chaos and anarchy, the political parties who are not on the TTP’s hit list are merrily campaigning away with nary a thought that their counterparts in the ANP, the PPP, and the MQM are hamstrung, not being able to campaign openly because of the TTP’s threat to attack them and their supporters if they hold any public meetings: witness the ANP’s tribulations in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Isn’t it time that all politicians got together and condemned the TTP? Do those that are not threatened realise that if the parties that formed the last government are today under threat, the shoe may well be on the other foot tomorrow? Do they really think that the TTP is a nationalist movement, how many times must I say this, which will turn their Kalashnikovs into ball-pens and their knives and axes into notebooks?

What will happen when those who consider themselves in the “good books” of the Taliban come into power themselves and have to fight them? Do all the portents not point to a Taliban takeover of the whole blessed country? As I tweeted the other day, the TTP are but a few hundred beheadings away from complete power: just you wait until headless bodies are found on successive mornings hanging upside down in Faisalabad; Gujranwala; Multan; Hyderabad; Lahore, and why not, Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Recall Swat and Buner, gentlemen, and pull your heads out of the sand.

More than anything else, do these political leaders not consider the fact that even if they swept the elections, theirs would be a pyrrhic victory? And let alone our own people, even the rest of the world will not respect their mandate? I have to add my voice to that of my friend, Abbas Nasir, who used the word “disgusting” in describing the loud silence emanating from the “kosher” parties in his piece in Dawn of last week.

Let me also say that it boggles the senses that two of Musharraf’s stalwarts, Major (retd) Tahir Iqbal and Tariq Azeem, are going places in the PML-N. Iqbal replacing Ayaz Amir as the party’s candidate for NA-60 Chakwal, and Azeem becoming head information honcho.

While Iqbal’s tenure as a minister in the Commando’s cabinet was singularly unremarkable, Azeem excelled himself as chief spokesperson for the dictator during the judicial crisis when the Commando had locked up the chief justice and other members of the superior judiciary and even stopped their children from going to school. He was thrashed by lawyers during one of the big demos in Islamabad for his pains.

More importantly, I have to add that Ayaz Amir was a credible MNA, whose articles, critical of his own party’s government, showed the party to be democratic and open-minded. There should always be criticism within political parties such as there is abroad, particularly in the UK. I would freely equate Ayaz with Roy Hattersley of the Labour Party (Deputy Leader ’84 – ’92) who too was critical of his party in his writings, yet was elevated to the Lords. Oh well. As an aside, Roy and I had some memorable “lunches” in London.

Let me end by refuting all news to the effect that I am even contemplating co-hosting a television show alongside “Hazrat” Zaid Hamid as Tweeted the other day by a friend. Nothing could be further from the truth: I wouldn’t give the nutjob the time of day let alone be in such close proximity with him.

Finally, respect to the ANP. May their party workers be safe.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 19^th, 2013.