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.khaliquegmail.com