Pukhtunkhwa Province: What’s in a name?

What’s in a name?
PML (N) guru LUHAR Nawaz Sharif’s referendum proposal on Frontier province’s renaming is though itself evasive and eyewash, reeking as it does of sheer political expediency and lack of courage to take a clear-cut position on the contentious issue. But the ANP clan’s own reaction is crude, churlish and a vulgar show in theatrics. Do the Pakhtuns really need just a name change of an abode for their recognition or identification? Aren’t they known worldwide for their valour and bravery, for their independence-mindedness and intolerance of subjugation, for their inviolable code of honour and dignity, and for their unrivalled hospitality and congeniality? And haven’t they commanded this repute in all the ages and through all the times, generations after generations? Doesn’t history recall with awe the victories of their redoubtable warriors and heroes on the battlefield and their chivalry off the battlefield? Aren’t their venerated poets’ verses still recited with delight alike by literary buffs and critics as also ordinary poetry lovers here at home as also abroad? And aren’t their saints remembered with reverence widely for their message of human love and affection, compassion and mercy, and brotherhood and humanity? Aren’t their eminent personalities’ accomplishments in statecraft and swordsmanship, professions and vocations, trades and skills, and arts and crafts residing warmly in the people’s living memories near and afar? But what then is in a name? A country or a province acquires fame not for its name but for its people’s quality of life, their toils and labours and what they produce in their factories and on their farms. A city is known not for its nomenclature but for its civic services. A hospital gets its reputation not what is written on its signboard but from the standard of its healthcare facilities and devotion of its doctors, paramedics and staff to serve the ailing public. And a school makes its name for the quality of its teaching and standards of its education. What has the ANP clan put in by way of performance to give plausibly a name change to the province? It is now in a headlong chase to hit the second year in rule. What has it accomplished in these two years? Lawlessness and criminality are still raging ferociously, keeping the entire province in their vicious grip. The provincial metropolis of Peshawar is virtually emptied out of big businessmen, traders and industrialists, all having migrated to other places for fear of being kidnapped for ransom. Sick industries are lying sick unattended and uncured, and collapsed industrial estates are still lying in ruins, all crying for revival. No policy has the clan unfolded to salvage the rotten state schooling and public healthcare systems. Nothing has it put in place for the fructification of tremendous Pakhtun youth talent and potential. Having the field day on the clan’s watch is only its ineptitude and mismanagement, with its klansmen setting an all-time-record in sleaze and corruption. The clan is showing itself for being incorrigible devotees of the goddess of wealth, possessed of a rapacious passion for self-enrichment. Spicy stories are feverishly making the rounds of the grapevine, speaking of their honchos’ stunning money-minting by means foul in heaps and mounds. They are building to themselves palatial homes even overseas, with a special craze for establishing their households in the Gulf states. Their offspring they are sending out to India and other select destinations for higher education. And if the clan’s predecessor priestly orders employed their spurious piety and calculated religiosity as a camouflage of their avaricious money-making errands, the clan is using its pretentious Pakhtun championship and secularism to this effect for the same moneymaking pursuit. But its pretences to both Pakhtun nationalism and secularism stand exposed, all torn to shreds by its acts over these times in rule. By caving in to the “fanatical” Swati thugs and their allied imposters for quite a time until the clan was retrieved by the army, the klansmen have conclusively demonstrated that neither are they secular as they deceptively style themselves to be nor are they the kind of true Pakhtuns they project themselves to be. Indeed, by hitting a demeaning retreat with their tails between the legs in the face of those marauding thugs, they even have insulted the glorious name of Pakhtuns reputed to keep fighting on even a giant but surrendering not in any event. So the clan can earn not a name in history by manipulating a name change for the Frontier. That repute takes what this clan definitely has not in it. What a misfortune of this swindling pack!