There’s a story from the mid-1960s about a commanding officer of a unit who ran out of cash during a card game at the local club. About midnight, he had the regimental treasury chest opened and a thousand rupees brought to him. When the game ended before dawn, he had recovered his losses and had the “borrowed” funds deposited back where they had come from.
Since no one was the wiser for it, all remained well for the moment. But things did not stay this way for long. Within a fortnight the cat came out of the bag and a court of enquiry against the colonel was ordered. Within another eight weeks, the process against him was complete, and he was thrown out of the army for having kept a thousand rupees in a state of “misappropriation” for five hours. The general belief was that he had got off lightly.
The above could happen only because this was a fighting army in those days. Its culture was defined by integrity and the spirit of “volunteering for action”. To keep this integrity intact, bad eggs had to be routinely thrown out. Only when these began to be preserved and promoted to general, did the waging of war against the state and abducting its citizens establish itself as its creed.
But things have slipped massively since then. Finally, two years back they reached their very abyss when an army chief, partnering with a handful of lesser generals, overthrew the government of a hugely popular Prime Minister at the behest of a foreign power. This not only changed the country’s geopolitical orientation but also ran it aground when it was beginning to make significant progress to recover from blows dealt by Covid. To ensure its death, it was handed over to certified pimps and thugs, who were installed as its Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Governors etc.
[This was the gift of the army high command to the country which sustains their lives in clover. Apparently, this thought has seldom knocked on the doors of their closed minds!]
Before retiring, after a theft of some billion rupees, our traitorous army chief had already set the country onto the open road to gangsterism by the military. They had already murdered their first journalist, and attempted the murder of an ex-Prime Minister [for which even the F.I.R was not registered], while abduction and torture were fast becoming their speciality, and house break-ins a matter of routine. This is not the stuff of fighting armies.
The army was handed over to someone even more gifted–an ingratiating cadet striving for adequacy, who worked his way as a non-consequential anomaly through the middle ranks, and having wormed his way right to the very top, who now looks quite literally and spitefully down on all those whom he has climbed over. And those trodden over are behaving as if obsequity was the very purpose of their creation.
That he was God’s gift to humanity, born to crush and lord over it, few have believed with such ardour, as the army chief himself. Even a shadow which falls across the path of this belief is not to be tolerated and must be slashed and cut down. Much quality time is being spent to make this belief incontrovertible, while he and his inner circle are playing snakes and ladders with the state. The moving pieces on the board are the police, the bureaucrats, the judges, the army, their pimps and thugs, and the PTI. The shifting goalposts in this game are the Constitution and the PPC. The rules guiding the game are those of ad-hocism. The aim is to entrap and destroy the PTI. If Pakistan goes down in the process, so be it, because Donald Lu will help us recreate the country through the magic of another cypher!
They have already decided to ban the PTI, which has the following of eighty per cent of Pakistanis. They are counting for success on the combined strength of their malice, half a million bayonets in the hands of unwilling troops, and their squad of eager pimps, thugs, and whores, already installed to ruin Pakistan beyond redemption!
Ever since the Supreme Court Judgement on the Reserved Seats’ case, they should have had some sense knocked into their heads, and waved their wet dreams goodbye. But old habits die hard, and so they are soldiering on from one disaster to the next.
The high command’s thinking is known to us through its solemnly declared aims. These were to bring stability, prosperity, peace, and harmony to Pakistan. But being used to linear thinking, mercifully they do first things first. For the moment therefore, their energies are concentrated on breaking down the PTI. [They will attend to prosperity AFTER this phase has been completed]. Within this larger objective of destroying the PTI, their immediate objective is to keep Sanam Javed in jail. This seems to be their full-time job for the moment, because the moment she gets out, she has to be sent back to prison, for which plans need to be ready. This has been taking up a large part of the collective genius and energy of the high command. So they have not been able to devote enough time to destroying so much else which they could have!
With such elevated thinking, they cannot understand why Pakistan is stubbornly resisting its push to prosperity!
Mercifully, their formula for bringing about prosperity is taking time, which is retarding their “progress”, and allowing us a breather when all seems lost.
Yet, I believe that Pakistan will get through this dark passage. Over the coming few weeks though, our once beloved army stands poised for a fight to the finish against the constitution of the state. Our higher judiciary will be the target of this attack. The belief is that disregard for the judiciary will itself make the Constitution inconsequential. Keeping the sanctity of the Constitution in mind, the high command is committed to dismantling it using only “constitutional” tools. For a start, they have decided to pack the Supreme Court with shady ad-hoc judges so that Qazi Faez Isa, the chief thug of the judiciary, may attain majority support in the court once more. Thus equipped, the job of the final shredding of the Constitution will be left to him. And this he will then be able to accomplish gleefully and quite legally!
The high command believes that somehow a state shorn of its constitution will nevertheless remain “constituted”. Being good soldiers, they have been ordered by their Chief to believe this, and thus they continue to do so. Those who withhold adherence to this belief, will be sent home. Going home is not easy when the prevailing work ethic inclines them all to remain in office.
But I am certain that this last battle will be won by the state. Should the generals finally be willing to listen, the refusal of the judges to be re-employed in ad hoc slots is the cackling of canaries in a coal mine; and none has cackled so loudly and caused such a heartbreak as Justice Aaliya Neelum. The game is over. Hopefully, soon the headless torsos of many of those who attempted to destroy the state would be dangling to decorate the gibbets all along the roads of its cantonments and its rich gated communities.
P.S. Just as I have completed this piece, I hear that in Bannu today they have crossed the line. They have used the army to kill unarmed civilian protestors to create grounds for the imposition of a national emergency. They have won their places on the gibbets. They have lit the spark which can only lead to the fire which will engulf the whole country.
Email: saeedakhtarmalik85@gmail.com