Maryam Safdar has been angry for quite some time now. As the grating realization is dawning that her crown has been irreversibly lost to her, she is not just losing her temper; she seems to have lost the last fragments of good sense too. Flailing about in the darkness, she has come up with yet another scrap of doctored “evidence” on the basis of which she hopes her sunken fortunes will be redeemed, and the family will be restored to its thieving ways.
And thus, snarling in high dudgeon, she presented the Arshad Malik video at a press conference, flanked by the most morose looking senior idiots of her party on either side.
This family has come a long way from first coming on national TV channels and lying through their teeth about the properties they owned; papa Sharif repeating the same lies in the National Assembly; then pitching in the infamous Qatari letter to repair their family fortunes; graduating to the Calibri Font forgery; and now all the hopes of this lying and thieving lot seem to be resting on this video of a hopelessly compromised and dishonest judge.
This is a unique case of graduated dishonesty being marshaled to retrieve the fortunes of a morally disabled family!
Maryam’s next logical and legal step should have been to present the original video to the Islamabad High Court with the prayer that this be made a part of the case record which is pending with them on appeal.
This is what needs to happen if it is Maryam’s aim is to spring her father from jail on legal grounds.
But this is not what will happen. Maryam will not present this “evidence” to the court. She will not do this because she knows that this evidence is both tampered with and tainted and will therefore not stand the test in court.
Even a superficial examination of this evidence, prima facie, reveals that it is an attempt at entrapment and blackmail. And that this evidence is definitely doctored. Any fool can conclude that there was a criminal conspiracy behind this attempt and doctoring of the “evidence”.
The question is, who was behind this conspiracy? One of the conspirators was definitely Maryam herself. But she would not like to be exposed. In this attempt to get her father out of jail, she would not want herself to be in the hilarious position of ending up next to him. She would therefore not like to have this new “evidence” examined in depth. So, she will not present it to the court. She does not want any legal mileage out of it. Legally this family has no legs to stand on.
But she will play it to the hilt and try and get the maximum political mileage out of it. She will try to incite and inflame passions of the people on the street; she would like to see anarchy; deaths and destruction will suit her. Ideally, she would like the state to be brought to its knees. In this she will hope to find redemption.
But what concerns me and many others like me is, should the higher judiciary not feel constrained to take suo moto notice of this extremely serious issue and form a JIT to determine the facts?
Should it not preempt what threatens to follow? And if not, why not?
If this issue is investigated with diligence and competence, Maryam Safdar will be found at the epicenter of this conspiracy.
If she does not take this “evidence” to the Court, where it properly belongs, it must be reasonably concluded that following any legal path was never her purpose. Creating chaos was i.e to win on the streets through mayhem, what has been lost to her in the courts.
And she has blatantly threatened that in case she is restrained in any manner from carrying through her designs, she will bring to the fore more such videos, and out secrets which she holds. Ostensibly some of these would be state secrets.
In short, she is promising to blackmail both individuals and institutions and to incite people on the streets, which could result in unrest, damage to property, and loss of lives.
Unless sowing civil unrest was her primary aim, why would she be trying to cause incitement, instead of presenting her “evidence” in the Court?
When lives are lost as Maryam’s planned caravans snake their way to her “success”, who will be held responsible for the mayhem and deaths caused along the way? Will it be Maryam Safdar, or Athar Minallah who let her out on bail on the strength of a judgement in which prejudice shamelessly hides behind crass incompetence?
p.s. Papa Sharif’s dish of “gongloo” gosht can no longer be allowed to come from home. Like Gandhi, who frequently resorted to hunger strikes to bring freedom to India, Papa Sharif has promised to go on hunger strike till his right of home cooked gongloo gosht is restored. To add weight to this threat, Maryam has promised to go on a dharna outside Kot Lakpat Jail. Both are pretending to believe that home cooking will restore Papa’s health, while both know full well that what the whole family has battened on is not home cooked food, but on the marrow of the bones of the people they had sworn to serve.
But if the two of them took their threat to the very end, it may do a lot of good to Pakistan. It will rid us of one of the monsters who very nearly devoured the state. As for Maryam Safdar, her dharna will melt much about her that is so easy on the eye. What will be left of her will be her new resemblance to the poor women of Lahore, many of whom scour the rubbish heaps, trying to find abandoned morsels on which to feed their children. This is the closest that a women like her can ever come to humanity.