Mehrangate : Indulgence in absurdity

Editorial:Frontier Post

Now that the proceedings on the infamous Mehrangate have taken off in the Supreme Court, a funny political play is also in feverish enactment on the public stage. The Sharif Brothers and their acolytes are blowing hot and cold. Although the name of the elder sibling Mian Nawaz Sharif had popped up the day the scam had surfaced back in the mid-1990s, the Sharif Inc. is now crying foul. Making vehement protestations of innocence of the two brothers lording over the PML (N), the party caboodle is shouting that they are being conspiratorially targeted. On the other hand, while the gloating shoals of the PPP are screaming at the two brothers to come clean, the internal security czar, minister Rehman Malik, is shouting from the rooftop that he has incontrovertible evidence of their complicity in the scam, which he can produce if asked by the apex court.
But both sides are indulging in absurdity of the preposterous proportions. As the case is now before the court, it has to be decided on the judicial floor, not on the political corridors, the media channels or the public forums. If the Sharifs think they are clean, the right course for them is so obviously to prove their innocence in the court, establish there the fact of conspiracy they and their toadies are crying of, and get their names cleared. Then why are they raising all that hue and cry outside the court and not knocking at its door? And why Rehman is making his tall talk in the media encounters and not going straight to the court to divulge the incriminating evidence that he claims to be in possession of? Should he insist on an invitation from the court when as a citizen it is his moral, ethical and even legal obligation to assist the court in arriving at right decision? The court comprises the nation’s venerable legal minds and will rule on the case in their best lights.
There indeed is too much of perfidy to the act of both sides. It is all politics, nothing less, nothing more. It is plainly the discomfiture of each other they are gloating on. The PML (N) was dancing jubilantly so long as the PPP was on the mat for the slew of corruption cases against its head-honchos. And now that the Sharif Inc. is flattened on the floor, the PPP phalanxes are in a binge of rejoicing. Ironically, the PPP crowd has all along been dismissing those cases as conspiracy against their party leadership as is the PML (N) gaggle doing now. That crowd asserts that those cases were wrong and willfully slapped on their leadership by the Sharifs and their hatchet workers. And the Sharifs’ acolytes are likewise now bemoaning that some buddies and beneficiaries of the PPP leadership have been fielded to sully the names of their head-honchos.
But if the two sides think that they are deflecting or influencing the public opinion in either way, they are badly mistaken. They decidedly are not. They are befooling nobody in the masses who for long have passed the verdict that they are landed with kleptocrats posturing as their leaders. Mehrangate or no Mehrangate, their long-standing judgment is that in their self-styled leaders they actually have crooks and imposters who have robbed them mercilessly for making their own piles invariably at the people’s expense. And, verily, in the masses’ eyes, the self-touted pious faces are the ugliest on earth. It is only the lackeys and sidekicks of these fraudsters who tell them not of this public estimation of them. None of them indeed comes across to the masses as a paragon of virtues. They all figure to the peoples as stinking bundles of vices and moral turpitude.
Do the PML (N) and PPP partisans really think that the masses are not mystified that how comes that the Zardaris with their known means could own up a king’s palace in France or a fancy apartment in New York or a chateau in Dubai? And do they really think that the masses are no lesser intrigued how could the Sharifs build a palace in Jeddah, own up a luxury apartment in London, set up steel mills in Saudi Arabia or float a booming real estate business in Britain when they had escaped with an empty pocket to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after a disgraceful reprieve deal with Pervez Musharraf? Do they really think that our people are so stupid that they know of all these things, yet harbour no questions in their minds, expect no answers to their questions and form no opinions? They have only to peep into the street and will know from the red faces that the ongoing deceitful slanging match between the PML (N) and the PPP sidekicks is drawing over there now. The circus show is showing no grandee across the divide in a pleasing light. All look so dirty and ugly.
But will the lackeys across the board take mercy on the beleaguered masses and spare them the torture of their perfidious jugglery? If they have something to say, they should go to the respectable apex court and get themselves exonerated from there. The people’s court has long condemned them all as an avaricious greedy lot and no friends of the masses.