When Caesar met the Speaker

MPA from DG Khan may well have quoted another line: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

A few years ago, a parliamentarian did the unthinkable: he quoted Shakespeare on the floor of the Punjab Assembly.

It was the middle of 2009: the budget was out and, as with all budgets since the dawn of time, Southern Punjab had gotten short shrift. It seemed the finance bill preferred the big city to rural areas, and the MPA from DG Khan was upset: he’d studied at Lahore, lived in Lahore, and liked Lahore — that didn’t mean he’d forgotten his hometown.

The gentleman quoted Brutus, “It’s not that I loved Caesar less, but I loved Rome more.”

Suddenly, the assembly was afire; something other than stamping out agri-tax had captured its imagination. Another MPA from PML-Q Forward Bloc (the story is very much of its time) thundered the gentleman must stop bashing Lahore.

Speaker Rana Iqbal tried to calm the second MPA down but it was too late: he staged a one-man walkout over this insult to Lahore. According to the press report, “he was later brought back by Education Minister Mian Mujtaba Shujaur Rahman [at the] speaker’s request, and the minister also lectured the house on avoiding hurting each others’ territorial feelings.”

That would seem the end of it, courtesy Messrs Iqbal’s and Rahman’s firefighting skills. But no fight for Lahore can be complete without the PML-N.

Nawaz League’s MPA (from Lahore, of course) rose on the next point of order. Another batsman for Team Central Punjab, the MPA said, “Since [the gentleman] has called himself Caesar, he must know how Caesar was born. It was his difficult birth that gave birth to Caesarian Operation (C-Section). How bad Caesar proved for his mother.”

It’s hard to make up: a quote meant to stress the deprivations of Southern Punjab gave way to Lahori rage, which then gave way to Baby Julius’s birth (a flawed account: Caesar was never born via Caesarian).



And while the gentleman defended himself — saying he’d neither insulted Lahore nor called himself Caesar — Southern Punjab drifted into the dark once again. As of the 2015 budget, it’s stayed there.

Unlike that precious assembly debate, accepting we have a problem may be the first step towards a solution. But who has space for solutions when we barely manage damage control?

We have the summer on record: the Kasur sexual abuse case has been wiped clean from our memory — a vicious crime against our children. Where both state and society should have pushed hard; for child-friendly courts and protection centres, for amending the penal code to insert child pornography provisions, for including self-protection in the curriculum; it was thought best to let it slide. We settled for a suspension instead.

Because talking about child abuse is uncomfortable, because doing something about it is controversial, and because all optics are ugly. Only, when it comes to the rising rates of abuse in this country, it would be best to tiptoe out of our comfort zones.

For the citizen, at least. From the state, a pattern emerges: get smacked by a problem, wait out its press cycle, then get smacked by another problem. Who needs solutions?

As for blind spots elsewhere, the Supreme Court (SC) delivered one of the most important judgments in its history — a 900-page doorstop of a decision in the 21st Amendment case. If our legal eagles were worried the SC would uphold military courts, and the press was worried it would restrict parliament’s amending powers, fear not.

The SC managed to do both: upholding military courts while taking a dim view of the men and women we vote for. “Let us not forget,” holds the majority decision, “that Fascism in Nazi Germany was ushered in by the parliament itself.” The judgment puts limits on parliament’s right to amend, holds that it has no right to repeal or amend the Constitution’s “salient features”, and makes several references to the Third Reich.

Yet when it comes to the press, the decision — and its massive implications — has sunk without a trace.

Compare this to the attention the NA-122 election tribunal has received, from conversations to column inches, and we understand where the real interest lies. In his defence, the learned tribunal judge wrote an emotional opinion, involving such Socratic questions as, “Am I created simply to keep on thinking about my food?”

The learned judge was degrees more reflective than most of us. Because the SC decision wasn’t the only bombshell we kicked aside this past August — RAFTAAR’s tax report was another eye-opener we averted our eyes from.

Nothing’s certain, goes the saying, except death and taxes. But while we’ve more than our share of the first part, taxes we can go blissfully without: 0.3 per cent of the population files income tax returns, our tax-to-GDP ratio is close to bottom in the world in terms of revenue, and our resulting public debt has tripled — just since 2008. The state’s response is indirect taxation, which means we break the backs of the poor instead.

Southern Punjab, child protection, constitutional amendments, tax reform — serious problems, structural problems, problems that will take years of work to fix. Might we drive the conversation forward?

Not when considering our track record. This Sunday marks 50 years since 1965, 50 years since Gibraltar and General Musa. Half a century later, we have no wisdom: What did the war mean? How best may Pakistan and India break the impasse today? Is Kashmir an inch closer to resolution?

Today, we’re as much in the mist. Firing against the Line of Control kills civilians every week. Kashmir is tougher to crack than it ever has been. Talks about talks have broken down.

Not that some would have it any other way. Over in India, Narendra Mussolini is celebrating the war — a lack of reflection isn’t limited to the border.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, the press has reduced all Indo-Pak debate to the Phantom phenomenon. Actor Saif Ali Khan says he has no faith in Pakistan (echoing India’s sentiments about his acting abilities). A Pakistani video response calls Mr Khan a woman. A blog calls the video response misogynistic.

Addressing the speaker a few years ago, the MPA from DG Khan may well have quoted another line from Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Reflection — and resolution — can wait.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 1^st, 2015.

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