A Government of Goons Has Pakistan to Ransom
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
What name would you give a government that subscribes to terrorising its people as its principal priority with the help of street-smart goons?
Nawaz Sharif was never known for his brains or imagination befitting the leader of a country of 180 million. It’s no less a national calamity for Pakistan to be ruled, for an unprecedented third time, by a man of such pedestrian intelligence as Nawaz. But the tragedy has, lately, been worse compounding because of his thuggish style of governance.
It was a national humiliation and shame when a peaceful bunch of blind protestors was savagely manhandled and roughed up in Lahore last week by the lawless Punjab police. Every decent Pakistani—at home or abroad—was made to squirm in utter disgust seeing those poor souls being treated like pack animals by a police force that has gone completely berserk with crass connivance of the rulers.
Lo and behold—but not surprising at all—not a word of condemnation of police brutality, or apology over the ghastly incident, was uttered by any one of those minions of Nawaz and that loose cannon Shehbaz Sharif, who otherwise never tire of pontificating over the most trifle of affairs. Like the Mafioso keeping their lips sealed because that’s the way their Don wanted it, silence reigns to a deafening crescendo in both Islamabad and Lahore on this issue.
But the Lahore incident was just a dry run for the bloody episode that unfolded in Faisalabad on December 8—the D-Day of PTI’s previously-announced agitation. At least one—and possibly two—of PTI’s young workers was murdered in cold blood on the streets of that city. The episode was captured live on television. Anyone could see that gun-toting goon of PML-N unsheathing his gun in full view of the police posse supposedly stationed there to keep law and order; he wasn’t stopped by any of the law enforcers from committing murder in broad daylight of an innocent PTI aficionado.
That the crime in Faisalabad was committed under the canopy of supposed law-enforcers isn’t surprising, given the track-record of a trigger-happy Nawaz government. What transpired in Faisalabad is reminiscent of what had happened, earlier on a much larger scale, in Lahore when 14 workers of Tahir-ul-Qadri’s PAT were murdered by the government-commissioned goons—its so-called Gulloo Butts licensed to kill.
It took a wave of nation-wide condemnation of the Lahore mayhem before an un-repenting government cabal would agree to register its FIR. It took six weeks for the paper work to get started; take your pick how long would it take for justice to be dispensed.
As a token of bending to the popular uproar, Rana Sanaullah, the irascible and garrulous Law Minister of Punjab—and a close confidant of both Nawaz and Shehbaz—was made the fall-guy and forced to resign. But that was out of sheer expediency—just a sop to an irate people of Pakistan clamouring for justice—that the wicked Rana was sidelined to hoodwink the people. The rogue otherwise remains the main hatchet man of the Sharifs.
A goon to boot, Rana was given the license to ‘teach a lesson’ to PTI and its leader, Imran Khan, in Faisalabad. Apparently, he didn’t disappoint his mentors one little bit and performed to their highest expectations; he wouldn’t be the fiend he’s if he didn’t.
With a permanent scowl on his face and his drooping moustache dyed jet-black, Rana Sanaullah looks more like the vintage villain of a Punjabi movie than the leader he feigns to be. He’s a goon par excellence; a rogue and scoundrel of a special type who has been lording over Punjab with his retinue of Gulloo Butts and adding exponentially to its culture of feudal terrorism in politics.
If he’d any spark of intelligence, or awareness of how to govern a country as diverse and problem-infested as Pakistan, Nawaz should’ve fired Sanaullah, and other louts of his ilk, a long time ago. But Nawaz seems to be getting duller and more insensitive than ever by the day. He looks like a man sleep-walking with no idea where he may be heading for or to which side his government of nincompoops is taking the star-struck country condemned to be ruled by a man of his puny intellect.
It’s clear as daylight that Nawaz is unnerved by the increasing popularity and mass approbation of Imran Khan and his PTI’s relentless agitation against the ruling clique’s plundering of the country. He needed sane and sensible advice from intelligent people. But his tragedy—and that of Pakistan’s—is that he’s surrounded by a cabal of clowns, and knaves. Added to their abysmal IQs is their collective instinct of criminality. Their counsel to Nawaz is to brandish the stick and use its thicker part in silencing the agitation.
These rogues from Nawaz’ ‘kitchen cabinet’ are the same goons who’d invaded the Supreme Court of Pakistan in his second stint in power to terrorise the country’s top judges. So callous and craven are they that they have never, to date, had the decency to regret or apologise for their brazen assault at the highest citadel of justice in Pakistan.
Because they were never held accountable for that crime, they seem to believe that they are above the law of the land and can get away with white murder. No wonder, therefore, that their advice to their Don is to hang in there, tough and unbending, in response to Imran’s wave of protest and turn the tide against it by resorting to licentious use of the trigger. These rogues believe in the dictum that power flows only from the barrel of a gun.
Rana Sanaullah had camped in Faisalabad ahead of the D-Day and had the whole official paraphernalia at his beck-and-call to execute his agenda of subversion, which he did with utter venality. But the man is so shameless that he still had the cheek to deny any involvement in the crime and, instead, put the blame squarely at PTI’s door.
A government without moral authority is as good or bad as an illegitimate government. The Nawaz clique stands precisely at that tangent where its public approbation has plummeted to single digits, or even lower. The people of Pakistan are manifesting their total rejection of the cabal of robber barons who think it’s their divine right to go on looting them because they were smart enough to have filched the elections last year. The Pakistani people have been saying in many different ways that they will no longer tolerate this highway robbery to go on unchallenged.
The people of Pakistan have become intolerant of their robber-barons because they can now see light at the end of the tunnel; the light shining for them is Imran Khan’s call for accountability and transparency—something they hadn’t heard in a long, long time.
Imran’s singular contribution to what was, before he landed on the scene, a moribund political culture is the alternative his PTI offers the people of Pakistan: it is clean governance geared to the larger interest of the people in place of a moth-eaten system of spoils feeding the corrupt and making them richer and ever more powerful by the day.
Nawaz and his bunch of bumbling cronies may refuse to heed the writing on the wall but they know, as well as any pundit peering down his crystal ball, that the day of judgment in the court of the people of Pakistan is nigh for them. They may at best buy some more time and delay their tryst with it but can’t avoid it in the end. All these so-called icons of yesterday’s politics—Nawaz, Zardari, Altaf, Isfandyar et al.—are in the path of the people’s march to destiny and will be dislodged from their pedestals, sooner than later.
The status quo in Pakistan must give way to the people’s inexorable hankering for a revolutionary change in their political fortunes, or else there would be deluge and tumult. Any attempt to block the people’s relentless march to change—with the kind of thuggish crimes committed in Lahore, Gujranwala and, latest, in Faisalabad—would add to their frustrations and unblock the flood gates of a bloody civil war and revolution.
A blood-soaked denouement of the ongoing battle of wits between the law-abiding followers of Imran and the rogues masquerading as minions of Nawaz is still voidable if only the rulers of the day wouldn’t lose their dwindling stocks of sanity. A thug like Rana Sanaullah is no longer the choice of the people of Pakistan to lead them. They would rather have a mature, dignified and sensible man like Imran as their leader. Sanaullah is a symbol of the status quo that the people of Pakistan want to get done with—warts and all.
The greatest service Nawaz could still do to a Pakistan held to ransom by him and his cabal of robber-barons is by heeding the people’s rising call for him to go. Go, Nawaz, go. For God’s sake get the hell out of Pakistan and allow its people to move on with the leadership they crave and deserve. You’ve had your day. But for Pete’s sake go. This country of 180 million souls deserves better than you and your rogues and scoundrels. (The author is a retired ambassador and career diplomat)
- K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
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