Funny times and unintended humour

Islamabad diary

As Imran Khan’s assault on Islamabad the Beautiful nears, the distress of the ruling party is becoming comical. See this comedy on the front pages of newspapers where a veritable war of statements has broken out, sundry League loudspeakers and town-hailers vowing 1) that the march is unjustified and 2) that it will not be allowed to happen. Like the lady in Hamlet these loudspeakers are protesting too much.

If the ruling party can stop the march what need for this war of statements? Just a thought but why don’t League MNAs and MPAs hold counter-rallies? It won’t bring about any martial law…of that they should rest assured. It will only give some confidence to an increasingly nervous and rattled party. But the brave statement is easier than any tougher alternative.

Muhammad Zubair, state minister for privatization, has been a singularly luckless lord of privatization, with nothing to show for himself on that front. But every other day he must hold a presser blasting the PTI…to prove his existence I suppose or his usefulness. The PTI needs to spend nothing on publicity. It is getting more free publicity than it can handle.    

Maulana Fazlur Rehman, ace political gymnast, suppler than the wind, is also on this rhetorical bandwagon, regularly denouncing Imran Khan. One thing about the Maulana, and this goes to his credit: he does nothing for free. What’s in it for him in this season of distress for the ruling party? It would be fascinating to find out. 

In the run-up to the siege of Islamabad – for which, as noted, the free publicity is coming from the ruling party – N League supporters, and passionate sections of the media, are divided into two camps: born-again constitutionalists who are seeing in all this an assault on democracy; and development specialists hoarsely shouting that it’s all a conspiracy against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif is the lead singer in this chorus.

In spinning these theories both camps are heroically averting their eyes from the real cause of this crisis…the Panama leaks. All Imran Khan is asking is for the ruling family – prime minister and talented offspring – to come clean about their Mayfair properties and offshore accounts. The Mayfair flats date back to the 1990s when daughter and sons were yet in their teens or pre-teens. So there are legitimate questions of real ownership involved, and where the money for these acquisitions came from…and whether these acquisitions were ever shown in tax documents or election papers.

Anywhere else this would be explosive stuff, threatening not just disqualification from public office but criminal proceedings. Bereft of credible answers, N League drummers are playing up the threat to the political order and citing the CPEC at every opportunity. They are also attempting to throw dirt at Imran Khan.

Mendacity has become a feature of our national life. The Sharifs have got away with so much. They were clearly hoping they would get away with the Panama leaks as well. But when they proposed a toothless judicial commission, My Lord the Chief Justice saw through the charade and rejected the proposal. And the ruling family has not been able to come up with anything better. It was playing for time and confusing the issue. But unlike other scandals over the years which the Sharifs have not only survived but digested, this is one scandal which has refused to go away.

The Asghar Khan case – involving the distribution of Mehran Bank funds by the ISI to a list of N League politicians including Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif – would have destroyed not one but several PPP governments. The PML-N was immune to its radioactive effects.

Model Town happened in broad daylight and not in some remote corner of North Waziristan but the heart of Lahore – 14 people, including two women, shot dead in cold blood and over 80 injured by police firing. Even in apartheid South Africa and occupied Palestine this would be counted as something big. But our survival artists have escaped the consequences…at least up till now.      

They even got away scot-free with their claim that they had concluded no agreement with Gen Musharraf for exile in the Holy Land in return for staying away from politics for ten years. Time and again they solemnly said there was no such agreement. Saudi Prince Muqrin, then chief of Saudi intelligence, had to come to Islamabad and brandish a paper at a press conference to refute their claim. Lesser mortals would have been reduced to utter, perhaps irredeemable, confusion. Not so the Sharifs who calmly countered that, yes, there was an agreement but for five years not ten.

Such is the level of their confidence (which the uncharitable would call brazenness). But having survived so much two things are sticking to them: 1) Panama leaks and 2) Imran Khan. Without Imran Khan, this scandal would have died, like so many others, buried in the graveyard of things scarcely remembered. You have to hand it to the man’s grit and perseverance that he’s hammered away at it and kept it alive.

The more the Sharifs and their spoons run him down and denigrate him, and they are doing it as a fulltime occupation, the more of a nightmare for them he has become…the ghost at their table, destroying the splendour of their feast.

They’ve had the measure of other politicians. They’ve quarrelled with army chiefs and lived to tell the tale. Musharraf’s coup and its long aftermath they survived and that’s no mean achievement. But they have not been able to shake off Imran…and now Imran, casting all doubt and reservations aside, wagering all on a gamble, perhaps the biggest of his political life… is throwing everything he can muster and mobilize into the march on the capital.

The Sharifs are rattled, you can make that out. But it could go either way, and if it is failure there will be a stiff price to pay. But Imran is not sitting on his haunches…that too you can make out. He’s doing everything, visiting every place he can, to fire up his supporters and get them ready for what won’t be an easy undertaking. He’s already created the right atmosphere but the fireworks are still ahead.

Imran is playing with fire, say armchair defenders of democracy. They said the same thing about Bhutto when he led the movement against Ayub Khan. Every agitation for change is playing with fire. Every effort at questioning an entrenched oligarchy – and that’s the system we have in Pakistan – is playing with fire. Prudence and caution are bywords for timidity and when you are playing for high stakes timidity never got anyone very far.

This is for high stakes and much hangs in the balance. And the generals who have their own axes to grind, and their own accounts to settle, look with drawn eyes at this brewing crisis. These wary looks add another dimension to this whole situation. Everyone is guessing, will they or won’t they?

Not just Islamabad but the entire country is abuzz with rumour and speculation. Everyone is waiting and Imran is getting his people ready. And the Sharifs are praying – it is not too far-fetched to suppose this – for some miracle to happen.

What a movie Alfred Hitchcock could have made out of all this.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com