All talk, no action

The failure to utterly condemn, unequivocally the dark works of TTP is shocking.

My maternal grandmother was a formidable woman, and not for nothing in her later years (but very quietly, she had ears like battlefield radar) was she referred to as ‘Grenade’. It was she who introduced me to the evocative and wickedly derogatory saying ‘all mouth and no trousers’. Deconstructed, this means that the person being so elegantly insulted is all talk and no action, with an inferred subtext of trouserly deficiencies that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, none of them flattering.

Grandmother had opinions of a rigidity that made tungsten steel look positively plastic and Neville Chamberlain, he of the Munich Agreement and ‘peace in our time’ was somebody who was the recipient of the mouth-trouser sideswipe on more than one occasion that I remember.

All of which leads us to an emerging picture of a government that is increasingly displaying a surfeit of mouth but a considerable shortfall in the trouser department. Most obviously, this is in the failure to utterly condemn, unequivocally and without ‘misunderstanding’, the dark works of the Taliban in general and the TTP specifically.

Try as I might on September 15 - beyond the ritual, largely empty and lacking in heartfelt sincerity condolences for the families of the military men killed in Dir by the TTP, there was not a word of condemnation. Not a peep, nor a mention in any public utterance that I could find that the country’s leading terrorist organisation had killed two of the nation’s finest military officers. Trousers? Invisible, seemingly. To be scrupulously fair Imran Khan of the PTI speaking on September 16 was good enough to suggest that the terrorists might have shot themselves in the foot, but he remains an exception.

Running parallel to the story of the Dir bombing was that of the appalling rape of a five-year-old girl in Lahore. She had been dumped in the grounds of a hospital after being abducted from close to her home and is reportedly out of danger in physical terms but mentally, is going to be scarred for life.

Once again there was a wringing of political hands at this heinous crime — but no federal governmental or provincial response that committed resources to countering the mindset that saw this child so horribly hurt. Nor any suggestion that the law regarding rape might need to be revised when it concerns a minor child, only the cheap words that flew away on the wind leaving the victim and her family to their misery.

In Lahore, the police are still struggling, no doubt hampered by a lack of forensic resources, and given the parlous state of evidential gathering, with at best a 50/50 chance of a successful prosecution even if they collar the right suspects.

Where the mouth-and-trousers element came to the fore was in the thin response to a request for protest from civil society organisations. True, there were protests in Lahore and other cities but they were poorly attended and made none of the impact that the protests in India made after the rape and subsequent death of a young woman. Her rapists were swiftly caught, prosecuted and sentenced to death last week. As a friend of mine commented on Facebook it would be better if those who expressed their outrage on Twitter (the mouth bit) actually got out on the streets to make their feelings known (the trousers bit).

In the week that sees the first anniversary of the YouTube ban after orchestrated nationwide violence prompted by an obscure film, that was blasphemous but to which the reaction was disproportionate; the nation has largely failed to stir itself either in the face of terrorism or at a crime committed on an innocent child. My grandmother’s ghost would have taken a very dim view of all this. ‘All mouth and no trousers’ her shade would have muttered — and it would be hard to disagree.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2013.

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