Our affliction has been long and unrelieved except by dreams of our own making, weaved around false promises dished out to us. We’ve been in slow decline, but what was a gradual fall has become a torrent in the recent past. Like the value of the Mark in Weimar Germany, the life of our most disgraceful scandals has been reduced to minutes now, before they are overtaken by new ones.
By this measure the last four weeks were especially “fruitful”. We had Azam Swati given the “treatment”; Arshad Sharif being murdered abroad; Imran Khan surviving an assassin’s bullet; and then Swati’s video of kosher love being put in circulation as if the relationship was illicit!
Each of them was a major crime, none of which could get a decent burial, because the mourners in each case were called away by a greater outrage just as they were about to inter the previous one. But these crimes will be recalled in time to be counted as benchmarks of our disgraceful slide.
Beyond this, who can say what their value will be. They come so thick and fast they are devalued as soon as they are committed.
Assassination as a tool to neutralize a troublesome political opponent will, in time, become the norm. If Imran Khan could be targeted, whether by a government arm or agency or a privately arranged hitman, who in Pakistan is safe?
But this could go well beyond mere political assassination as well. It could morph into a revenge cult seeking the blood of sellouts and their relatives. The deadly range of such a cult will go far beyond our frontiers. This idea did not die with Udham Singh despatching Michael O’Dwyer in London. It is alive enough to fire the imagination of any young zealot and inspire him into action. And if historical precedence for this be needed, witness the early jewish Sicarii or the Hashashin.
The inspiration to seek martyrdom in order exact revenge is as old as man himself.
This thought should bring some sobriety to those planning a quick getaway out of Pakistan [having sold it out] just in case their final plans don’t work out.
And what may one say about the ever-expanding sordid video industry of Pakistan? Whether Mariam Safdar, ever impeccably coiffured and arrayed in finery [a part of which each of us has paid for] will become Pakistan’s prime minister, who can say? But few will deny that she remains the unchallenged queen of Pakistan’s dirty video industry. The success and popularity of this industry suggests that the starring role in the next such video might be given to Mariam herself. The only question is who among the many eager jokers does the director plan to pair her with?
One can barely imagine the shrieks of holy horror when this video is premiered, and it hits the phones!
But the womb which gave birth to Pakistan’s possible undoing, of which the above are just minor manifestations, is the brazenness and brutality of the unsatiable greed with which we have been repeatedly looted and ravaged by our leaders, when our gatekeepers and protectors either slept through the loot, or with one eye open, gave them a nod and a wink to proceed without fear. Barely a year ago this role of the gatekeepers was so far beyond the imagination of most, that beyond mere suspicion by a mere handful, no one could have thought about it. And yet, within a few short months, one is hard put to find any serious doubters about the role they have been playing at least since the year 2000. The consequences of this malign partnership among our “elite” are far too many in the sweep of their range or in the depth of their gravity, to be assessed with any great degree of accuracy.
Except for the deep feeling of rage and helplessness in each individual heart, there is no real measure of this betrayal or its possible consequences.