The victory lap

Some of the politicians on the (supposedly?) winning side of the current divide in Pakistan are behaving in a manner reminiscent of victorious soldiers in history. Their laughter as they occupy captured territory is hoarse in the most dramatic style and they must mock at the vanquished in the most crude tradition. This attitude of those who believe they have triumphed over and trampled upon their enemies is no more pungently reflected than it did in a speech in parliament by a stalwart of the treasury earlier this week.

The gentleman is a veteran parliamentarian belonging to the Sharif camp who has been in the National Assembly for more than three decades. He has been kind of a favourite of journalists who, according to their own claims and admission, have been more inclined towards highlighting the views of lawmakers with something substantive to say.

Not only this, the particular legislator has a reputation of speaking it out bluntly. Shaming his opponent on the floor in charged Urdu has been one of his brightest moments of his career and that he has managed to get away with remarks in which he had likened an honourable woman member of the assembly to an agricultural vehicle is largely due to the ‘parha likha’ image of him that he has managed to cultivate in the media over the years.

The speech archive of the lower house would reveal that the gentleman considers himself some kind of a crusader for truth. He is not in the mould of Shahid Khaqan Abbasi whose utterances at public forums outside parliament have painted him as a rebel in the PML-N. Quite to the contrary, the lawmaker at the centre of our discussion is considered to be a Sharif faithful who is nonetheless keen enough or conscientious enough to offer his own long lament about the rotten state of the country’s affairs.

This may be an endearing sight for some in a country where resignation rather than struggle appears to be the easy choice for a large number of people. On the other hand youngsters may easily mistake the most experienced elected representative of theirs for a grumbling old man full of complaints and with no solutions to suggest.

In the latest outburst, the most respected has gone after expat Pakistanis. If this was not strange enough, he has chosen to create a divide between the expats – the bad ones and the good ones. According to him, there are the bad expats who live in certain Western countries, the kind who come to Pakistan only to bury their dead loved ones and who ‘shamelessly’ run campaigns against the motherland from their vantage positions abroad. Obviously, our man in the focus today does not approve of the group. His heroes are the sons of Pakistan who toil in the heat in the land of the ‘iqamas’ or resident permits or the Gulf.

Seriously sir? Do you really mean it or can we blame this latest episode, coarse by even your own standards of candidness, on a flight that was a source of some due embarrassment later? A self-rebuttal would appear to be the order of the day to those with a fair idea of the influence Pakistani expats living on democratic societies have come to exert on fellow country folks back home.

Meanwhile, we can pass time by discussing our own little theories about the origins of the anger that oozed out of the declaration of persona non grata pasted on a section of Pakistani expats in the august house, mind you, accompanied by thunderous applause by the honourable members.

The signs are grim. The cries of delight are crude and betraying the most basic animal instincts. A side has been defeated, the all-prevailing sense indicates, and the attitudes of those in the ‘winning camp’ show a predilection for post-battle vandalism as an essential part of victory celebrations as also as a measure to demoralize those on the losing side.

In this case, this vandalism must extend to the foreign lands that had contributed so hugely in providing the wherewithal to the ‘enemy’. These are not ordinary foreign lands which are thought to have provided the origins for who is already sarcastically remembered in Pakistan’s power corridors as a ‘fitna’.

The writer is a senior journalist.