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Welcome home

By Kamran Shafi

BUT we shall go there later. Wow! What a surprise that the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) Supreme Court has ruled overwhelmingly, and in every respect, in favour of the Commando’s election as ‘president’ of the Islamic Republic!

Never mind, of course, that a precedent has been set for other Bonapartists, other usurpers in army uniforms working the American agenda of the time, to knock on the court’s door and demand that their ‘election’ as president of the Islamic Republic by another rigged assembly be ratified, otherwise martial law/emergency!

Never mind too that respected newspapers such as The Guardian have called the PCO Supreme Court a ‘kangaroo court’. Who cares, however? If an institution is on the side of the establishment and its Daddy of the time it is fine and dandy, but doomed be its eyes if it so much as tries to be even a little bit objective. Oh yes!

And what a ludicrous defence of their flawed stand by the transitionists when they say that the transformationists are to blame for Musharraf’s knee jerking as hard as it is! What the devil did we do other than ask the political parties and civil society to completely isolate the dictator?

The news is bad, however, with Benazir backing off from the tough stand she took before that architect of many a Latin American coup, Negroponte Sahib Bahadur visited the Land of the Pure and picked up the telephone to her. Did he read the riot act to her rather than to Musharraf?

Has the PPP softened its stand to negotiate a few more seats under the president’s kind control — as we subcontinentals are wont to say when applying for jobs — who will reportedly allocate them according to a plan already hatched in a special cell reportedly set up somewhere in the vicinity of Aabpara if you see what I mean? Go on; surely you know what I mean!

I am just back from a trip to Karachi and the gup there is that the major political parties, the PML-N and the PPP, will be allowed from between thirty to forty seats each, depending on who is the army’s flavour of the month; 90 or so to the PML-Q and the rest divided among the Mullah-Military Alliance (aka the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal) and others under the umbrella of something akin to the Chand Sitara (Moon and Crescent) Party that we saw emerge in 2002 out of, you guessed it, near Aabpara!

Which be as it may, readers will recall that I have often referred to our country as being a most unique place, peopled by a most unique lot, specially our leaders.

It would not surprise me therefore if the president for whom it is Pervez Musharraf first, second, and last, has decided to pull the rug from under the feet of the House of Zahoor, Gujarat Sharif.

Who and their cohorts and gofers such as the most lovely Wasi Zafar and Sher Afgan might well not be missed now that he has to defend him none other than Barrister Shahida Jamil. Polished while she is, the lady is as mindlessly stout in her defence of the Commando and all that he does as the two beauties above named.

I quite frankly fell off my chair when, defending the emergency (read martial law) she said it was quite alright to act unconstitutionally and illegally when the situation demanded it. I wondered if she would not only resile from her stand against them, but actually defend the alleged extra-judicial killings in Karachi of yesteryear.

Yet there is an upside in all of this that I can feel in my bones. And that is the arrival of Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif, and Begum Kulsoom Nawaz and family, who are back in their country after a long exile.

Welcome home to them and here’s hoping the opposition will now be united on a two-point agenda: robbing the dictator and his junta of any legitimacy at all and vociferously demanding the restoration of the pre-Nov 3 superior judiciary.

Let the Gujaratias, the Mullahs and all and sundry referred to above win what will then be a non-election and pack the assemblies. Let them form the next governments. There is such a thing as doing what is right, and which will elevate the PPP and the PML-N onto a very high pedestal indeed.

Incidentally, I have always believed that the PPP’s boycotting the 1985 elections was the right thing to do. It was this act and this alone that saw the party win the 1988 elections, and which it would have swept had the ISI not engineered the IJI into place using hundreds of millions in state funds.

And now for Amreeka Bahadur. If anyone thinks I am running a campaign to expose the American administration’s insalubrious hand in our travails, he/she is right! Of course I am! For I want my American friends, and I have many, to understand that if they have an ‘American Dream’ so do we Pakistanis want our own ‘Pakistani Dream’.

One in which we are free to choose our governments and then have the freedom to vote them out. One in which we too have a fiercely independent judiciary. One in which there is not the dark shadow of the army looming over us.

So, buddies, stop micro-managing us — we don’t exactly live in the trees you know.

Bushism of the Week: “I don’t particularly like it when people put words in my mouth, either, by the way, unless I say it.” —President George W. Bush - Crawford, Texas, Nov 10, 2007.

P.S. May I express my outrage at the continued incarceration of Munir Malik, Aitzaz Ahsan, Justice (retd) Tariq Mahmood and Ali Ahmad Kurd. All good men. None of them terrorists.

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk