Courtesy their shenanigans and confrontationist politics, President Asif Zardari and Mian Nawaz Sharif have turned Pakistan into a Zimbabwe, where an autocratic ruler Robert Mugabe and his opponent, an equally intransigent Morgan Tsvangirai, locked in a severe power struggle, had hurtled down their famine-stricken and economic-woebegone nation in a deep pit. And so have these Pakistani Mugabe and Tsvangirai their terrorism-plagued, poverty-ridden and disease-afflicted people. And just as neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai was ready to budge, so is neither Zardari nor Nawaz. And just as African leaders, fearing Zimbabwean turmoil's spillover to neighbouring countries, had stepped in to intervene and disengage the two Zimbabwean power fighters, the Americans and British have moved in to separate these two Pakistani combatants, no lesser to save their own so-called war on terror from being affected by their fighting. This foreign intervention may have massaged enormously these two fighters' bloating egos; but the least amused are the people of Pakistan at being treated like a colony and slaves. They are ashamed that for leaders they have such egotistical persons as these two, who have sacrificed their people's self-respect and dignity at the altar of their blinding selfishness, giving it a pious cloak with puerile pretences and deceitful posturing. Divided they are irreconcilably over the sacked judges' issue, each feigning to be acting by principles, which neither is actually. And while Zardari is unloading truckloads of his chosen judges on the superior judiciary, as indeed did Benazir in her second government, of which the country's then top judge came to know from the media as did we the hoi polloi, Nawaz is pretentiously clamouring he wants sacked judges back for judiciary's independence. An independent judiciary he blares is indispensable for democracy and the people's wellbeing. Alas, this realisation has come to him too late, if at all. Where was this belief of his when during his second power stint he set his party goons on the Supreme Court, making its judges to run for their lives, some say the top judge bare-footed? And where was his conviction when he toyed madly with his craving to arrest the then top judge and imprison him even if for a day? Musharraf was very cruel to the judiciary. Yet even he didn't attack the Supreme Court, not even a lower court. Contemptibly, he did send packing a whole lot of judges he was uncomfortable with, for which he deservedly had to pay a heavy price. But, mercifully, he spared them this atrocity of physical assault. But how can a judiciary become independent and delivering if you have non-PCO judges in higher judiciary, as he wants, even if they are very good, but leave the lower judiciary rotting as it is in incompetence, corruption and sleaze? And where does the judiciary perform the feats of improving the people's economic conditions, creating jobs and providing employments, laying out public healthcare facilities, and catering to the people's basic necessities, for which he says he wants an independent judiciary? Where do the judges frame education, health, social welfare, agricultural and industrial policies? Do they do it in America, Britain, India or any other state? Aren't these the executive branch's functions, not judiciary's, even in a banana republic? And yet he talks this bunk with a straight face, as if he is a great sage, throwing around his pearls of wisdom. But why is that silent majority keeping silent, quietly lapping up the deceit and deceptions of Nawaz and Zardari? Why doesn't it call their fraud? Doesn't it occur to it that these two billionaires have mountains of slush moolah in foreign banks, huge businesses, properties and homes abroad to live on luxuriantly for generation, if, God forbid, some calamity befalls this land? This silent majority has only this homeland to live in and thrive on. So it must speak up. If it thinks the self-styled civil society will speak up on its behalf, it is mistaken. It would not; it is actively on the side of one or the other of these two power fighters. Not expect this it should even from the media which is as elitist as are these two in thinking, outlook and views. It, too, is voicing their causes, not ours, the hoi polloi's. This silent majority has to make its own voice and make it heard. And that it must, as the rot has now gone too far. Sit silently it now should not; nor should it let itself be taken for granted any more.
Saved from: http://www.thefrontierpost.com/News.aspx?ncat=ed&nid=266&ad=14-03-200
Dated: Friday,March 14, 2009, Rabi-ul-Awwal 15, 1430 A.H.
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