Wise to spare anti-apartheid hero shallow rhetoric

Sparing Mandela the shallow and hypocritical rhetoric was rather the best tribute that Sadiq could imagine for him.

Most of my colleagues in the press gallery felt upset and annoyed when the Speaker National Assembly, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, adjourned the sitting without dealing with any item put on the agenda for Friday. This he ostensibly did in deference to path-breaking contribution of Nelson Mandela in political praxis.

The offended colleagues earnestly desired that like their colleagues in the senate, the national assembly members should also have duly recalled the heroic struggle of a great leader through sombre and soul-searching speeches.

I did not share their pain. From heart of my hearts, one rather felt relieved for no speechmaking on this occasion. Sparing Mandela the shallow and hypocritical rhetoric was rather the best tribute that Sardar Ayaz Sadiq could imagine for him.

“Truth and reconciliation” is the decisive legacy of Mandela. So many years of solitary confinement failed to kill his passionate heart that kept throbbing for fellow humans. Without abandoning his zeal to assert the human dignity and consistent struggle for the cause of liberty and equality, he showed an astonishingly majestic capacity for forgetting and forgiving after liberating his people through protracted battles. He forced his diehard followers to eschew the accumulated bitterness of centuries for building a new South Africa.

Although savouring the magic pull of an iconic Messiah, he also refused to behave indispensible for his country. After assiduously putting up a doable system for running and governing the new South Africa, he walked out of the presidential palace with heart-touching grace and went on living as an average mortal.

Hardly a person sitting in our national assembly should dare pretending as if sincerely trying to emulate him. Our elected houses are rather crowded with below-average stuff. They are but mediocre players of petty power games. Most of them simply act as robots while seeking the attention and approving nods of their respective “leaders”.

Imran Khan surely had the potential to look different and initially he did trigger some hopes for change. Just look at the conduct of PTI zealots these days, however. Instead of steering the parliamentary and political business to fresh and hope-inducing paths, they keep throwing tantrums like the confused teenagers. Some leading stars of the PTI have certainly savored a distinctly elitist adulthood. Coming closer to their retirement age, though, many of them have begun to act like the most ardent rebels. Currently, they keep staging dharnas to stop the drone attacks on Pakistan and seriously believe as if being able to outsmart the global and local elite by holding carnival-style rallies.

Pakistan Peoples Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto used to monopolize the things revolutionary in this country once upon a time. Now a sly backroom dealer, Syed Khurshid Shah, leads its members in the national assembly. He also forces you to yawn, whenever given the floor. The rest of PPP MNAs miserably fail to stir things as well.

Yet the far more frightening remains the reality that even after reaching the prime minister’s office for the third time, Nawaz Sharif continues to move about randomly. Without a well-thought-out script, he seems visibly bored with mundane official business. He certainly feels baffled and overwhelmed with the plethora of complex issues forwarded to his desk for daring decision-making. Talk to any of his closest aides and he or she would appear equally clueless regarding priorities of the PML-N leader like you and I.

For the past ten days, insidious whispers are also becoming louder to make us believe as if the prime minister is suffering from “acute depression” these days. A set of peculiar columnists with obvious connections to invisible monitors and regulators of the state business in this country have rather begun dropping heavy hints to suggest that the prime minister has lost the capacity to concentrate. He is often reported “not being there.”

Let me state it categorically that I do not believe any of the sinister stories that are being spread about the “depressive” state of Nawaz Sharif for the past ten days. But a definite clique of bureaucrats, once known for their ardent loyalty to Shahbaz Sharif, fully facilitate the spread of such stories with unguarded comments to journalists they trust and regularly use for spinning political narratives. With the landing of Nawaz Sharif in the prime minister’s office six months ago, these bureaucrats had cunningly managed to place themselves in highly influential positions of the administrative structure in Islamabad. Yet, they now feel unhappy for not relishing the “autonomy and freedom” which they claim was “generously granted” to them in Lahore during the previous five years. We surely need to know the ‘real’ Nawaz Sharif, ASAP.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 7^th, 2013.