Strange ways of the Islamic Republic

Flood waters may have devastated Sindh again, knee-deep water may be standing in Karachi, and Lahore, the capital of good governance, may be, for the second year running, in the grip of the dengue virus but through long experience we know how to take such disasters in our stride. These too will pass. Next to the national capacity for cynicism is our stoical attitude towards calamities, man-made or nature-inflicted.
Perish the thought of learning anything from last year’s floods or last year’s dengue invasion. Doing that or taking preventive measures simply would be out of character. That’s not how things are done with us. The call for collective prayers is the last refuge of the Islamic Republic in distress. Having issued such a call, let no one say President Asif Ali Zardari has not performed his foremost national duty.
The matter is now between the Pakistani nation and the throne of the Lord of the Worlds. Let Him now come to our assistance. We have done what the dire situation demanded. The rest is up to Him and His boundless mercy.
And let no heretic think it will be any different next year, or the year after. We will continue to behave as we do and when things get desperate we will invoke the intervention of the Most High. And our duty will be done.
And let no one crib that the president thought fit just at this time to go for a medical check-up to the UK. If he had stayed here what Napoleonic effort would he have led to combat the flood-waters or the dengue onslaught? As for the prime minister...well, about him the less said the better. Certain things, certain people, are unimpressionable. Hit them with a sledgehammer and they will not get the point. The prime minister, entirely in character, has been away on one of his endless foreign visits. If he had stayed behind, everything would still be the same.
The Punjab CM has been in Sri Lanka seeking help for the dengue outbreak. We helped the Sri Lankans in their civil war. It is but right they should return the favour and give us a somewhat better understanding than we seem to have of the dengue outbreak which, at least for the moment, has overshadowed everything else in the capital of good governance.
Next we could think of asking Bangladesh for help to get our population control programme going. Time was when we in this part of Pakistan would smirk at the Bengali gift for fertility. Now at least in this field we have left our former brethren far behind, our birth-rate ahead of anything that Bangladesh can boast of. But let’s look at the bright side of this conundrum. A higher birth-rate means more warriors for the greater glory of the faith. That can’t be bad.
Only problem is what temple of Somnath will our holy warriors strive to conquer? To the achievement of what noble task will their holy endeavours be bent? Kashmir and Afghanistan are littered with the wreckage of our dreams. Those lands, alas, are not to be conquered anymore, for which I would like to commiserate with my dear friends, Gen Hamid Gul and General Aslam Beg. The only place safely to be conquered is Pakistan itself but this has been conquered so many times in the name of Islam that the scope for further conquest, on the same premises, has been well nigh eliminated.
Next we could turn to Nepal, with its experience of Maoist fighters joining the political mainstream, for help in trying to understand how to bring Baloch and other rebels in from the cold and make them part of the Pakistani mainstream.
But first we have to see how the Sri Lankan experiment in Lahore succeeds. If imperfect memory serves, the last time we saw Sri Lankans in Lahore our holy warriors tried desperately to slaughter them, no doubt for the greater glory of the faith. And if they did not succeed, and no Sri Lankan was hurt, it was, sadly, not because of the brave and farsighted Lahore police but the presence of mind of their bus driver who put his foot down hard and did not stop until he had reached Gaddafi Stadium (yes, we still haven’t changed its name and probably shouldn’t....Gaddafi, whatever his later sins, helped us in times past. For Auld Lang Syne then let us keep the name unchanged).
Let’s hope our holy warriors can spot the distinction between cricketers and dengue-eradication experts. Although why they should have thought of visiting cricketers as a kosher target would forever remain a theological mystery. Their eminences Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Hakeemullah Mehsud should one day explain. Although if the best of our holy warriors can think nothing of attacking van-loads of school kids why they should baulk at a foreign cricket team is a point to consider.
But could some enlightened soul shed light on another mystery, of a judicial nature? Why are their Lordships in Karachi? That they have been disturbed by the lawlessness gripping the city, and by the hundreds of deaths in the last few months, is easy enough to understand. Their Lordships have taken suo moto notice of lesser happenings. Karachi affects the entire country, so taking stock of the situation there makes eminent sense.
But it would help, and even advance the sum of national understanding, if the nation was given some idea of what their Lordships were hoping to achieve. Their daily pronouncements in open court, their obiter dicta, the nation reads of with great interest and even excitement. But we have to pause for a moment. Are the armed militias operating in Karachi open or amenable to wordy admonitions? Their Lordships have said that the government should give in writing that it will not support any armed group. Really? Is this all? A written undertaking from the government? If only the Karachi situation was responsive to written undertakings. For beggars it would be their day of deliverance. They would be riding horses.
On stage no calamity is worse than a sense of anti-climax, of the thunder of the opening chorus ending, when the play is up, in a whimper. Beware a sense of anti-climax. Their Lordships, who could give amateur dramatists a lesson in the finer points of their calling, surely understand.
Their Lordships have no fiercer partisan, no admirer more steadfast, than the eminent Urdu columnist, my friend Irfan Siddiqui. But even he in his latest column has been found lamenting the circumstance that if their Lordships can come up with nothing better than verbal injunctions it will be a sad day for us all. I rest my case although it would be interesting to know what Mr Siddiqui is expecting of their Lordships? What is his idea of the tangible? Does he want them to pass strictures against the MQM? Does he want the army riding in? Some clarity would help.
My advice, for what it’s worth, would be slightly different. Of all the operations of war, retreat is the most difficult...not a headlong retreat, which is easily accomplished, but an ordered retreat. Generals conducting orderly withdrawals have earned some of the highest praise in military history. Going into Karachi was easy. The time may now have come for an orderly withdrawal.
But to return to other issues...the waters standing knee-deep in Karachi will have to recede on their own. There is nothing that we, or rather the municipal fathers, can do anything about this. In our calendar September is the cruellest month. That’s when mosquitoes breed the most. To the lunar and weather gods let us pray that September passes swiftly. October should bring some relief from the dengue invasion. Meantime the medical services, under-performing as always, will have to cope as best as they can. And of course there is always the recourse to collective prayer.
Why haven’t we heard something from the Young Doctors’ Association? They were on strike some months ago for higher entitlements. Can’t they issue some kind of a call fashioned around the dengue challenge? Or is that too much to ask?
Meanwhile I breathlessly await the next foreign trips of the president and prime minister. Keep at it, my masters, for when all else is forgotten by these small tokens of your national solicitude will ye be remembered.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com