Nisar’s over-the-top praise for a departed general

Trust the audacious presumptions of our so-called representatives sitting in the national assembly. They seriously imagined to have almost addressed the issue of price hike after delivering horribly insipid speeches during the past three sittings. It was time to move on and why not to do something new now for improving the state of law and order all over the country.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the interior minister, had no objection to the suggestion and the house was smoothly steered to go through another round of bombastic speeches on a highly complicated issue that has developed deep connections with developments beyond our borders, especially in Afghanistan.

Before leaving the house, however, the interior minister suddenly recalled that the national assembly had not taken appropriate note of two momentous happenings: the smooth and orderly retirement of General Kayani and Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Betraying his reputation of being a rude recluse, Nisar tried hard to sound generous and went on and on to praise the departed Chief of the Army Staff and the Chief Justice.

Perhaps due to his ‘martial connections’ that he inherited for being a scion of Payal Rajputs from Chakri, the interior minister remained far more profuse while praising the ‘democracy-stabilizing’ role of General Kayani. Doing this, he did not pause for a second to recall that a country always earned the prize of freedom and democracy, primarily due to the protracted struggle of its civil society. No adventurer in khaki could dare to act like a pretentious savior, if politicians were really committed to sustain and defend the democratic order.

Kayani could have been the ultimate gentleman-soldier on this side of the Suez, as Nisar tried hard to make us believe, but it certainly was not due to his gracious heart only that we somehow reached a stable democratic order after smooth transition from one to another elected government. The scheming minds of politicians like Nisar cannot fathom the vigour and dynamics of peoples’ power, however. They have instinctively developed a peculiar form of path-dependency. For them, wretched of this earth are not ‘citizens’ but ‘subjects’, condemned to feel good or sad merely due to the whims of a ‘Sultan.’

I did not intend to listen to any of the speeches on law and order. Dr Shireen Mazari of the PTI forced me to stay put in the press gallery, however. She, for sure, baffled me by repeatedly taking on a ‘mindset,’ which she claimed, had recently reflected itself through the arrest of some wanted and hardened Jihadis from various hostels of Lahore, otherwise reserved for students of different universities.

Feigning so worried regarding the said ‘mindset,’ the experienced university teacher in Dr Mazari conveniently forgot that “the boys” she had talked about were also found enjoying the protection extended by the students’ wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami. The JI, incidentally, is the most formidable ally of the PTI in the coalition government of the K-P. These days the youth from the same party act as the vanguard of vigilante bands busy in trying to block the NATO supplies to Afghanistan. After cultivating such a deep strategic connection with the Jamaat-e-Islami, the PTI ideologues like Dr Mazari must show some grace by not sobbing over a ‘peculiar mindset’.

The street-hardened Sheikh Rashid Ahmad is another ally of the PTI. He often acts like a political guru of Imran Khan, when it comes to learning tricks of toppling an elected government by igniting street agitation. The content of his speech on law and order certainly showed that he fully knew what was happening in downtown suburbs of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Yes, a son of Jalalluddin Haqqani was murdered in Islamabad, but the local police did not put that on record through a formal FIR. His dead body was later taken to North Waziristan for burial and we have yet to know as to how the long travel happened.

Rashid was also justified in recalling the frightening story regarding “a group of youthful Jihadis,” which had been conducting deadly rehearsals to attack some government buildings in Islamabad with remotely controlled ‘toy planes” stuffed with explosive material. But he never dared to add that the group he kept on referring to also had deep connections with some of our “freedom fighting brothers and sisters of Indian held Kashmir.” Rashid preferred to ignore this side of the story, simply for the fact that for the past so many years he had been loudly boasting of running a ‘bread and breakfast facility’ for his Kashmiri brothers at his expansive farmhouse in Rawalpindi, throughout the early 1990s. By telling half-truths, Mazaris and Rashids of this world can just not ensure peace and order in Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 13^th, 2013.