Our media and leadership relish deriding Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his unfriendly stance. Agreed, but see his remarkable grasp of national affairs with which he addresses his audiences locally and abroad for hours with great coherence and fluency. We too have one whose commitment to the vital issues of the country can be gauged by the number of pieces of papers that he produces out of his pocket to read out haltingly. It is only fortuitous that he does not hop over to his favourite basket for dishing out ghost motorways, universities, hospitals and metros while speaking abroad. However his fluency is impressive when secret personal dealings are questioned, where he can quote page, line and verse from family history of their ghost riches and supposed aristocratic ancestry. There are others in this sordid circus who dole out millions of rupees out of a provincial budget to a madrassa in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that has the dubious distinction of being the mother nursery and alma mater to the likes of Mullah Omar, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, Omar Khurasani and even Obama bin Laden. In this background it can be reasonably predicted that PTI’s plans for a forthcoming agitation against the government would be a dismal show. People of Pakistan have no patience left for “closeted” Taliban sympathisers, financiers and swindlers of public money. Fabulous riches, treasures and splendid palaces do not enrich a man nor endear him to people, far less to his kith and kin who usually eagerly await his final departure to partake of his unfairly amassed wealth. It is one’s goodness, service to humanity and acts of benevolence that really matter in the end. An abiding benevolence like Ganga Ram Hospital Lahore has made Sir Ganga Ram immortal long after he was gone. The funeral of Amjad Sabri, a renowned Sufi-poetry singing qaawal, in Karachi the other day had more grieving men and women than an emperor’s. Those who become rich by dishonesty, manipulation and excess are intrinsically insecure and scared sub-species. Their nagging moral deficiency surfaces in many different ways. Some become tyrants, others psychopathic bullies, supercilious snobs, and a few tight-fisted misers. However, their common traits are paranoia, fear of deposition and a high degree of superstitious-ness. They are afraid of dying as a class not because it is scary but more because once they depart their massive wealth would be left behind, disused and scooped up by others. Pushed by their guilty conscience and fear of ever-present imminent loss, they tend to hover around “holy” men, seeking their blessings and protection against unseen calamities, which in fact reflects their own sense of guilt and insecurity. Our lot is a strange mix of a sermonising priest in the body of a Dogra Maharaja who bought his kingdom for a sack of gold. Like the Dogra, our people also manufactured their pedigree after mounting the throne of Lahore. The Maharaja at least had a credible lineage; ours were simply men forging and honing Sikh tillers’ plows in their smithy in a small village in Punjab. They seem to have remained faithfully the same even after billions of rupees, and a good part of a century later. Their chronic self-consciousness for want of real substance drives them to the edges of ridiculousness. See the way they project their very private familial routine, or perhaps its absence, on TV screens to showcase their devotion and traditionalism, a clever device to trap popular sentiments. As the result of a seriously skewed worldview their faulty statesmanship has already touched rock bottom. Our national interest has been drowned under the weight of business prospects, and inexplicable aversion to those who talk of Pakistan’s sovereignty and prestige. It does not really matter to them if neighbours shell across our border, kill people and destroy houses. Nor does it seem to move them if they blast our border control installations out of existence, and then threaten us of dire consequences or paint us black as terror sponsors. Their stony silence and complete detachment from such slurs and serious provocations are puzzling, to say the least. It appears they are either deaf or dumb, or leaders of a country far away in the North Pole. However, going by PM Modi’s recent statement soon after their EAM’s angled disclosure about Modi-NS equation, it appears our leadership has been able to petition to the world albeit by the dint of their deficient intelligence quotient, native cunning or both, that they have to look over their shoulders before international undertakings. Modi’s well-put remarks amount to a subtle scorn and pity on the state of their empowerment, which they are sufficiently naive to accept as empathy. A dishonest mind loses the ability to retain dignity. Between perfidy and dignity there is only falsehood. A choice has to be made what legacy to leave behind. (Concluded) The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com