February 8, and its aftermath, may have lots of surprises in its fold – NPR

 

Curtains for Imran Khan or?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

There’s never a dull moment in Pakistan’s theatrical governance on the watch of its pompous and power-besotted Bonapartes.

So, under the relentless chokehold of pompous generals—whose long night of suppression of the people and their democratic ambitions shows no sign of abating—the theatre of the absurd goes on.

As if the sentences of 10-year rigorous imprisonment for Imran Khan (IK) and his second-in-command, former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, passed by a kangaroo court, on January 30—in the weird ‘Cypher’ case—wasn’t enough theatrics in the name of justice, another kangaroo court was prompted to come up, on its heels, with another sentence-on-the-run, on January 31.

This time IK’s sentence—of a more rigorous 14 years—has been coupled with his life-partner, Bushra Bibi. The husband-and-wife duo has been found guilty of ‘corruption’ in the ersatz ‘Tosha Khana’ case, just as IK was found ‘guilty’ a day earlier of ‘treason’ in the Cypher case.

The harsh sentences against IK haven’t surprised any political pundit, or even a layman, watching the macabre theatre of the absurd commissioned by the Pakistani military high command, swayed by its intoxicating raw power. The writing, for them, had been on the wall for quite some time, especially since the reluctant and delayed announcement—from the puppet-in-the-hands- of- the-generals Election Commission of Pakistan.

It didn’t require a genius to surmise that the Bonapartes were in a hurry to have IK out of the way before the February 8 elections. That also explains the obscene haste on full display in both kangaroo courts sentencing IK & Co. Defense attorneys weren’t allowed to present their arguments or cross-examine the battery of prosecution witnesses paraded like herds of sheep before the courts.

Making a complete mockery of justice, the puppet masquerading as trial judge in the Cypher case, arbitrarily asked a junior prosecution lawyer to act as attorney for IK, in place of his defense lawyers. There couldn’t be a greater travesty of justice, even by Pakistan’s risible bars of dispensing justice.

No doubt, the supine minions presiding over these cases against IK were doing a command performance overseen by smug generals who have arrogated to themselves the custodianship of everything that transpires in Pakistan. They may think that they have done in IK, as demanded by their imperialist masters on whose prompting the ball was set rolling against IK, almost two years ago.

The macabre drama of bringing down the popularly elected government of IK was in itself a command performance whose principal actor was the then head honcho of Pakistan Army, General Qamar Bajwa, who pulled the strings of Pakistan’s notoriously corrupt politicians—such as Nawaz and Zardari—to cook up a plan to topple IK from power.

Bajwa may have faded from the scene, but not quite. His remnants and lieutenants are very much in control of things ever since IK was brought down.

So, the script written two years ago—and the myriad actors enlisted to perform the drama on Pakistan’s stage—has been dragged to its final act. This may be the conventional wisdom ruling the roost in the power corridors of GHQ. But this could be as misleading as the remnants of Bajwa proclaiming from their hideouts that they’re sworn to have nothing to do with politics in Pakistan.

A persistent syndrome—of self-deception—swaying the heads among the Pakistani Bonapartes is their belief that they know better what’s in the highest interest of the country and its people than anybody else. This malaise has afflicted and hemorrhaged the minds of the top brass since the times—in the early 1950s—when they first strayed onto the political stage and stalked the landscape of Pakistan.

They have never vacated the stage for anyone else, nor shirked from their head-swaying belief that they’re the saviors and custodians of Pakistan.

Under this syndrome, an inebriated General Yahya refused to concede power to Mujib ur Rehman, who’d emerged as the favorite of the people of East Pakistan, just as IK is, today, the apple of the eyes of the Pakistani people, especially its youth.

The disaster that Yahya’s refusal to relent power in favor of Mujib spawned is the greatest tragedy to have hit Pakistan, to date.

However, the current leadership aggressively refuses to heed the bitter legacy of East Pakistan and seems hell-bent to repeat and re-enact the tragedy of East Pakistan in today’s left-over Pakistan. Last week, a kosher group of hand-picked youths was assembled in the hall of Islamabad’s Convention Centre where the chief lectured them for well over an hour.

Giving all the airs to himself as customary with Pakistani generals, he may have thought that with his eloquence he may win the IK-dotting youth to his side. But he only ended up hectoring his bemused audience—and through them the people of Pakistan—that he and his ilk wouldn’t give free reign to political leaders, or parties, to ‘endanger’ Pakistan and would step into the fray whenever they considered it appropriate.

This mindset—the ‘we-know-what’s-good-or-bad-for-Pakistan’ syndrome—has brought ruin to Pakistan many a time and would, again, if the Bonapartes persist in their favorite game of using political minions as puppets and handmaidens on the chessboard of politics in Pakistan.

It was that universally-acclaimed, real, and not phony, genius, Einstein, who said that an irrefutable proof of insanity is doing the same experiment, time and again, in the belief that the result would be different than before. Pakistan’s wizards and geniuses show no sign of having been cured of this syndrome.

But the Bonapartes may be as wrong and miscued as Yahya was, after throwing Mujib into the slammer just as they have done IK.

They seem frozen in a time capsule. But the people of Pakistan aren’t. They have moved on, particularly the youth who make up nearly 65 percent of Pakistan’s current population. They’re politically far more mature and conscious of the world around them than their elders, of half-a-century ago Pakistan.

What IK has done is that he has infused the alchemy of political consciousness and awareness in the younger generation of Pakistanis. Gone are the days when politics was a swear word to the intelligentsia of Pakistan. Buried is the period when they accepted Bonapartes, and their chosen messiahs-in-civvies, thrust upon them.

February 8, and its aftermath, may have lots of surprises in its fold. The aggrandizing generals—addicted to lording over Pakistan unchallenged and unquestioned—may see the curtain coming down upon them. IK may rise from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix. The long, agonizingly-long, act of the men-in-khaki may see its curtain call in the wake of February 8. Keep your fingers crossed, keep watching, holding your breath. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)