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Friday March 29, 2024

Lifafa, Nietzsche and the youth

My, my! Even if you have seriously criticised Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif, his government, his cabine

By Harris Khalique
October 01, 2014
My, my! Even if you have seriously criticised Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif, his government, his cabinet, his family, his businesses, his coterie of advisors, his governance, his performance, you are not spared. Even if you rebuke the PPP, demand a major shakeup in its ranks, highlight the inadequacies, admonish their performance in running the government of Sindh in particular, snub them for the lack of party organisation in Punjab and other provinces, you are not spared.
Even if you have used the most caustic words against the politics of the MQM, you are not spared. Even if you say that the ANP performed so poorly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that the blood of seven hundred workers and leaders killed by extremists could not turn them back in during the last polls, you are not spared.
But it is not the parties mentioned above that do no spare you. Instead, you are not spared by the PTI faithful even after you equally criticise the rest of the political actors, parties and groups. In Naya Pakistan, you will be spared only if you believe that Imran Khan is the messiah and you want him to become the prime minister, unequivocally and categorically, ideally by close of business today.
You are spared if you profess and preach that Pakistan will become a paradise on earth, power supply will be in abundance overnight, and corruption and mismanagement will disappear the moment he comes to power, injustice will be a thing of the past, quality education will be provided to all, state-of-the-art health facilities will be in everyone’s access, there will be an industrial revolution and so many jobs created that people will queue up outside Pakistani missions in world capitals to seek visas.
If you do not believe in all that is stated above and critically look at the current ability of the PTI leader and his faithful to bring about any significant change, if you are unable to see a clear plan beyond political rhetoric, if you can vividly see that even the unclear plan for Pakistan’s transformation is subservient to the naked ambition of capturing power by the leader, you will not be spared.
Don’t ask questions even if your questions are driven by a pure desire to get clarity yourself. If you are not a believer, you are a thief, a cheat, a swindler, a corrupt woman or man. You take a lifafa (meaning ‘envelope’ in English and a metaphor used for money or favours you get by toeing the line of a powerful person or an institution or a party other than the PTI).
Following in the footsteps of their leader, the frontrunners among the PTI faithful – the affluent middle-class brats whose own dads, granddads and uncles brought this country to where it stands today – are perfecting the art of levelling baseless allegations, accusations and blame on anyone who asks disturbing questions in order to shout down that non-believer through her or his character assassination and challenging the person’s professional or personal integrity.
They are unable to answer a single question their critics raise. They resort to abusing you. This is a shining reflection of their leader’s self-righteousness, conceit, impatient lust for absolute power and intolerance for even a minor difference of opinion. He blames everyone whom he sees as a reason for delay in him becoming the prime minister as a person with no character and integrity.
After the two big rallies of the PTI in Karachi and Lahore over the last few days, I posed a few questions, old and new, in all earnestness to an educated group of PTI enthusiasts in the Kohsar market of Islamabad where they religiously come for lunch every afternoon in these testing times of dharnas, freedom and revolution. I am reproducing the conversation here with as much accuracy as possible. By no means did I have an exhaustive list of questions and it was merely a coffee-table chat.
“Q: Khan Sahib mentioned in his speech about the case of that Pakistani-American woman imprisoned on charges of terrorism, Dr Aafia Siddiqui, who was handed over to the Americans by spineless Pakistani authorities. Her uncle came to find Khan’s support for the release of his niece. Does Khan Sahib know that Khursheed Kasuri was the foreign minister when Aafia was handed over to the Americans? Does he also know that Shah Mahmood Qureshi was foreign minister when the uncle came to visit him?
A: You take a lifafa.
Q: Khan Sahib is spot on when he says that the rich are becoming richer and the national exchequer is being defrauded. Does he know that his mate Jahangir Tareen, whose jet he frequently uses for travel, multiplied his wealth exponentially when he was a minister under different regimes? I am not even asking how the expensive fuel for private air travel is managed. But does Khan Sahib also remember a sugar crisis in the years when Tareen was a minister under martial rule and who was blamed for it?
A: You take a lifafa.
Q: Khan Sahib wants all our children to get uniform, quality and good standardised education. I am the first person to support him here. However, has the KP government begun to establish an egalitarian system successfully? Will Khurshid Kasuri and his family, who run the largest elite-school chain in Pakistan, open their gates to children from all classes? Will there be an end to commercialised private education once the PTI comes to power?
A: You take a lifafa.
Q: The PTI will revive the economy, bring power bills down to half, create jobs and at the same time make the national institutions function efficiently. Hmmm… This means our friend Asad Umar, the PTI MNA from Islamabad and certainly far better than the rest surrounding Khan Sahib these days, will replace his real brother Zubair Umar in the PML-N-led Privatisation Commission of today. Will Asad stop selling national enterprises or just sell those to Tareen rather than Mansha?
A: You take a lifafa.
Q: Why did Khan Sahib not mention even once the murder of Zahra Shahid, his ardent supporter and leader of the PTI in Karachi, and the election rigging done by the MQM in his Karachi rally? Also, what happened to the case filed in Scotland Yard against the MQM?
A: You take a lifafa.
Q: When pontificating from the container, Khan Sahib frequently says that one should always speak the truth. Who can not respect that? But is speaking the truth important only in political matters or is it applied to personal matters as well?
A: You take a lifafa.
Q: Khan Sahib is absolutely correct when he says he wants the nation to rise, throw away the yoke of slavery, stand up to the powers that be, etc. But at a smaller, more mundane level, after Khan becomes the prime minister will the disciples and peasants of the pirs and gaddi nashins in his party including Shah Mahmood Qureshi, stop paying tributes in cash and kind to fuel the land cruisers the pirs drive and the palatial houses the landlords reside in?
A: You take a lifafa.
Q: Last question, mates. I have tested your patience already. Can Khan Sahib confirm that the hundreds of kanals of land he occupies atop a Bani Gala hill in Islamabad does not include forest and common land of the state? Can he also confirm that people who live in his neighbourhood are wrong when they say that the boring for providing water to his house and land is done in the Korang riverbed – which is not legal?
A: You take a lifafa.”
Khan Sahib mentions Iqbal as his guiding light. Iqbal was influenced by Nietzsche, the German philosopher. Many of us view Nietzsche critically. But I am reminded of one of his famous quotes. He said, “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” Read both ‘him’ and ‘her’ here.
The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com