Daily Times

Oft repeated here and in the Twitter sphere is the reality of life that the usual invisible hands are in motion to sling whatever mud they can towards the usual suspects. Oft repeated here and in other spaces is my total admiration for a man who predicted all of this many decades ago. The audio of Maulana Azad’s address at Jamia Masjid New Delhi, post-partition, is available for the naysayers and the ignorant folk on most websites like YouTube and Daily Motion. What a damning and accurate prediction of our perpetual and never-ending political crisis. Decades later, the story is still the same; just the characters have changed.
The ongoing tug of war between the ‘God gifted’ politicos of this sorry land and its ultimate angels has continued to be the soap opera that has totally lost its plot. My personal opinion — and I know this may be too hard to handle for pseudo patriots — is that, perhaps, the sagacious Maulana knew our history very well. Muslim nations in general had extremely limited exposure when it came to the concepts of democracy, parliament or the idea of governance for and by the people. Besides, the characters surrounding Mr Jinnah were, to say the least, not leadership material and were severely deficient in foresight and vision. No wonder the untimely demise of Mr Jinnah and the assassination of his Prime Minister (PM) created an insurmountable vacuum. The conspiracies hatched by the bureaucracy along with others at the helm of affairs created a cacophony that haunts the polity to this day. Thanks must be given to the legendary columnist and commentator of BBC Urdu, Mr Wusut Ullah Khan, who reminded the people that the politicos of the 1950s were chastised for being corrupt and that nothing much has changed in 2015. The same invisible tug of war is being played with different characters.
The con artists that hog airtime to give a botox shot to ever-dwindling ratings and shamelessly predict the downfall of the civilian dispensation never seem to find a real job in their lives. But wait, perhaps it is their full time job to pretend to be spoke holes of the mighty establishment. It is again my theory that someone, somewhere, gets a sadistic nightly fix in seeing con men and occasionally women mouth off this vitriol and venom against inept and corrupt politicos. I would still ask the readers, who excels in the art of what is generally termed as psy-ops?
Does this mean that politicos are as clean as a whistle? Hell no. They have skeletons in their closets, perhaps too many. However, the one person, one vote concept is the ultimate weapon that citizens use to dislodge and register their dissent towards such unworthy characters. The idiot box and its paranoid parrots who repeat the same lines with utmost ease over and over again subliminally imply that politics and its champions are bad. Look towards the twin cities and pray for the intervention.
Every now and then the market becomes abuzz with rumour mills working overtime on how a new messiah has finally landed to rid this sorry nation of its miseries. This summer is no exception. From the looks of it, peddlers are pushing the pill that the landscape is about to change. For the umpteenth time, the corrupt will be taken to task and the ‘promised land’ will become a valley of nirvana. The man with no mercy will hold everyone accountable and a new leaf of tranquillity and prosperity will be turned. I have been reading about these make-believe worlds of happily ever after since my childhood. Selective accountability and selective justice is the antithesis of new beginnings.
The latest buzz is that our daring commando is trying to bring the alphabet soup sans N of what are jokingly considered as Muslim Leagues under the umbrella of our daring former dictator. For those who suffer from short-term memory syndrome, this was the original plan before the ex-president left his comfortable abode in Dubai to land in Karachi and ‘rescue’ Pakistan. However, the angry, middle-aged politico came in as a wild card to steal the thunder from the former president on and off Facebook and Twitter. The invisible hands blessed the former skipper and the rest is history.
At times, you bet on the wrong stallion and end up losing a fortune. It sure seems like these people have not learned a thing if they are trying to inflate the tubes of all these so-called Muslim Leagues that are comatose by overlooking that perhaps a whiff of oxygen will do them more harm than good. But, as the late Maulana said, Pakistan will always remain in a crisis, created by its very own people. I wish for someone to prove him wrong and that, too, just once.

The writer is a Pakistani-US
mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar