Daily Times

The National ‘Inaction’ Plan (NIP) has been in full force since the tragic incident at Peshawar’s Army Public School (APS). Talk is relatively cheap and in abundant supply in the land of the pure. The only noteworthy action that was seen was speedy execution of the convicts who tried to assassinate the former president, chief executive, glorified despot and dictator — not necessarily in that order — all in one, General Pervez Musharraf. Other than these executions, the rest is the usual hot air. The news we see is mostly mundane repetition of imaginary tales about what the future may bring.

The comical news items of politicos expressing their unrestrained resolve of what will happen soon, and so on and so forth is enough to make you chuckle. All of this makes for news items with a futuristic twang, a future full of forceful yet meaningless phrases. In reality, these are just imaginary phrases. My term of “cautious pessimism” is still valid here. We witnessed a lot of hot air and make-believe bravado after the aforementioned incident but people with a partially functioning brain could decipher that nothing significant was going to happen. Whenever in doubt, trust those brains with your eyes closed.

If you recall, the poster child of change, Mr Imran Khan, at that juncture decided to call off his record-shattering sit-in in the federal capital. Besides paying a politically embarrassing visit to the victims of the APS, there has not been a single thing that he or his party have done that demonstrates he even cares for the actual victims or their loved ones. Every day, he is hogging airtime drumming up allegations of the nauseatingly stale tale of rigging in the 2013 elections and harping on about his stolen mandate. The equally comical incumbents send their agents to rebut the charges and the deprived-of-brains media highlights it every night as a matter of national significance.

The idiot box shows the same old spats between the incumbents and the flag bearers of change. The zest, the energy, the will to repeat the same story over and over again is demonstrated with a renewed vigour. None of these patriots are willing to give up. Mr Khan is busy with threats of not letting this sorry government function at all. Perhaps one of his close associates gave him his nickname of ‘Ghaznavi’ to scare the incumbents. If this does not spell what the priorities are as far as this government and its overly popular adversary are concerned, then I am afraid, nothing will.

With such an engaging emphasis on such a critical national do or die issue of NA-122, it was no surprise that the dark forces of terror struck at an imambargah in Shikarpur with relative ease. A horrifying suicide bomb claimed 62 plus lives and hundreds were wounded. Amazingly, the same nation that was shaken to its core on December 16, a month and a half ago, pretty much ignored this as a sectarian issue. The idiot box continued with its signature idiocy and it was business as usual. The Prime Minister (PM) was in Karachi, trying to patch the two quarrelling political forces in that city with two magical words: “judicial commission”. One has to wonder where in the world one can find serving and, for that matter, retired judges to probe into matters of street crimes or the ongoing turf wars on the mean streets of Karachi. Can a judicial commission really take the security agencies to task, the main bone of contention, when it comes to the woes of a certain political party?

The PM who had the time to run to Peshawar after the bloody massacre was unable to head to an equally bloody Shikarpur, all because of security reasons. This is the highest-ranking leader of the country. If a country is unable to provide adequate security to him so he can meet the aggrieved citizens, then may the Almighty be the sole protector of the common folks. The rest of the faces that you saw in Peshawar were conveniently absent as well. I do not know what their excuse was but it is reasonable to assume that this incident did not qualify as a soul stirrer.

The collective indifference and lax attitude towards this bloody massacre was appalling. The idiotic reasoning provided to downplay the incident was equally hurtful. The term “sectarian strife” is not only misleading but also downright shameful. The people in the congregation had not threatened anyone to deserve such a cowardly attack. The other reasoning that was sold was that it was the expected blowback of the ongoing military operation. To say the least, all of this is nothing but a fabricated, bald-faced lie.

I hate to say this but I saw plenty of hash tags on Twitter that said #Neveragain, right after the Peshawar APS incident and read those hash tags as #Hotair. I hate to say something perhaps very offensive to a lot of folks but we are at a point of no return on the clearly visible path of self-destruction. Just assume for a minute that there is no Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), al Qaeda, and Islamic State (IS). Even if all of them are gone, there is something very fundamental that is absent within us, something that holds nations together. If you can find it somewhere, please do let me know.

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