” Zara num ho tau yeh mutti. “
How evocative and forlorn those words seem today when everything, including every hope and all that was sacred, has been sold? And the sale has been conducted by the very ones oath-bound to stand guard over us and to protect us? By those we worshiped with our hopes? By those who began with being our LAST line of defense, and ended up being reduced to becoming the LEAD line in our sellout!
And when we most needed it, the army abandoned us to the very vultures who had already reduced to a carcass, the body which once was a fledgling nation with hopes in the heart, a glimmer in the eye, and a glowing future in the offing!
This was no mere abandonment. This time the army senior command JOINED the vultures to peck out what was still left on the bones of a wretched and despairing people that they were sworn to defend and protect. A people who had dared to hope once more!
When this foul dust settles it will become known how much money exchanged hands between the Sharif’s and Maj Gen Ejaz Amjad, Bajwa’s father-in-law, to allow Nawaz Sharif to flee justice, and then to install the pimps in power.
Bringing Shahbaz to power was part two of the same deal. And this time the Sharifs have all the evidence of give and take. So, forget any chance of fair elections. The high command has its “reputations” to be worried about. And if Pakistan itself is to be sacrificed in the process, so be it. These reputations, even if they are those of pimps, need to be safeguarded.
When Asif Zardari, who left no crime uncommitted, was vaulted up to the office of President of this luckless country with the help of Gen Kiyani, it was felt that no more dire moral calamity could befall us.
But we were wrong. It was left to Bajwa, to bring out of the woodwork the suppurating rot of the nation, pimps one and all, masquerading as “democrats”, and install them in power to leave in the dust the miracle of Zardari’s criminal elevation.
To imagine that our army chief and his senior generals would do this to us was an experience so stunning that those who had any love for their country at all, could only imagine that this was either a bad dream, or the prelude to Judgement Day.
Their ears have since been cocked to catch the first mournful notes of the trumpet to be sounded for herald the Final Day.
Cry your eyes out all you want and pull out your hair, but the very thought of what has been inflicted on you will defeat your understanding and imagination to cope with it, and will slowly continue to asphyxiate you.
But you may get some relief as you cast your eye on the long arc of history. And how history has cast the DNA of the people of the subcontinent. You will find philosophers there, and the subcontinent is also famed for its mathematicians, but trouncing them both is the gene of the sellout. India’s three-thousand-year-old history is replete with instances of betrayal.
Go back to the time when Alexander was fighting in Sogdiana and Raja Ambhi of Taxila sent out an emissary to invite him over so that together they could put an end to the kingdom of Porus across the Jehlum.
Move forward to Rana Sangha’s invitation to Babur to come to India so that they could join hands and beat up Ibrahim Lodhi.
Or when Mir Jaffer, the commander in chief of Shuja ud Daula’s forces, was bought off by Clive.
And a little later when Mir Sadiq had the gates of Seringapatam opened to the British so that Sultan Tipu would give up his life fighting to stem the rot thus sowed by his minister.
And how the Dogra Raja of Kashmir and two of the late Ranjit Singh’s generals sold themselves to the British during the Sikh Wars.
Bajwa’s betrayal of Pakistan ranks above all of these. It is much the darkest crime.
In none of the other cases was the general public put to the slaughter by the new masters of the realm. But this is not so in Bajwa’s case. He is fully prepared to use the sword if it comes to that. But for now, he is satisfied with starving to death the populace which had always seen their army as their last bulwark against their despoilation by the politicians, the judges, the police, and the patwaris.
The people of Pakistan have already turned TO Bajwa through the only avenues open to them. through the voices that represent their sentiments. Bajwa has not listened to their pleas. Yet he has kept his dagger unsheathed.
He will only plunge it into them when they have nowhere to turn, and are compelled to turn ON him.
The 17nth of July is the day of reckoning when the Punjab bye elections are to take place. The stage is set for the most consequential elections in the history of Pakistan. The tinder is dry, and a solitary spark is all that is needed to set this country alight. This happened in Dacca in 1971 and resulted in the first destruction of Pakistan.
The army is the only power capable of preventing this fire from erupting on and sweeping across Pakistan.
But is there any chance at all that Bajwa and his generals will stand for Pakistan?