Nawaz’s mantra

Editorial:Frontier Post


But who will tell Mian Nawaz Sharif that democracy in itself is no magic ring that if rubbed on the stone, all the country’s difficulties and all the people’s grievances would stand swished off just like that. A panacea of it has to be made of to do that miracle. And that comes about not by chirping ad nauseam a democracy chant but by thinking out creative ideas, innovative schemes and pragmatic strategies to address the people’s problems and the country’s difficulties. But on that score, he has showed a stunning bankruptcy. Hadn’t it been so, wouldn’t Punjab where he acts palpably acts its uncrowned csar have become a land flowing with rivers of milk and canals of honey, which it is not so visibly? So much of democracy mantra has he chanted over these past few years that going by his recipe the province would have become a model of progress and prosperity, worthy to emulate not just nationally but globally as well.
But it remains as mired in people’s woes as the country’s any other part. It is only he, his younger sibling heading the provincial government and their toadies who project it otherwise, but so incredibly. If indeed Karachi’s residents are spending sleepless nights for fear of ravaging lawlessness, so do Lahore’s denizens for the dread of dacoits, thugs, thieves and professional killers. If the citizens of Peshawar and rest of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are in the throes of a stalking blood-soaked terrorism, their compatriots of Lahore are living no lesser in the dreadful shadows of prowling extremists who have made of Punjab their sprawling lair. And if Balochistan is a veritable mess of public services, Punjab figures no better, where indeed unfortunate people have recently been done in numerously by a deadly dengue fever for lack of preventive measures and killed by substandard medication at a government-run cardiology facility. And if the Zardari & Co. is running an inept and corrupt administration at the centre, the Sharif Inc. too is leading an administration reeking with incompetence and sleaze.
Had the democracy chant been such a charming spell, none of these adversities would have befallen the people of Punjab. There indeed are limits even to human skullduggery. But Nawaz knows of none. His perfidy is just unlimited. His pretences are stunning and obscene. He talks as if he has been a paragon of virtues, knowing not that the public perceptions about him and his sibling Shahbaz are as damning as are those about Zardari and Gilani. And if the people are talking about Zardari’s piles, on their tongues are no lesser tales about the Sharifs’ mounds. The Ittefaq Foundry since long exists sneeringly in the people’s mind as notoriously as does the Swiss slush money. In a nutshell, the people view Nawaz not as he himself and his hangers-on project him to be. He comes across to them as a compulsive tergiversator, changing stances to suit his political expediencies.
He is still to come up with a plausible explanation for ditching so unceremoniously his companions of the All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM), which he himself had cobbled up in his London exile-redoubt. The APDM congregation had vowed not to participate in an election under dictator Pervez Musharraf. But when the plunge came, he blinked not eyelid to fly into the ring, leaving the comrades nursing their wound he inflicted on them with his betrayal. Naturally, the people are taking with not just pinch but bags of salt his pretences of now being a hardboiled reinvented democrat, particularly so as he is still to confess and regret unambiguously his old associations with praetorian generals and also as he is yet to give a real democracy to his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, of whom he has made practically his family fiefdom, where nomination not election to party offices is rule, not exception.
Indeed, his pretentious posturing has become a source of mirthful jokes to an otherwise deeply depressed citizenry not just in Punjab but all over the country. His toadies may not have told him but he really throws his listeners into guffaws when he says so vaingloriously that had he not been toppled by Musharraf he was about to transform Pakistan into an Asian Giant. For, all the people know of is that he was leading Pakistan not to become any giant but to become a theocratic caliphate with him perched on it as lifelong Amirul Momineen. And it is only his shoal of toadies who get mesmerized by his brag that he withstood formidable international pressure and went ahead with retaliatory nuclear testing after the Indian adventurism. The street is least amused. For, had it been even a Mooda Joker in his place, he too would have gone for it as the public pressure was so tremendous that not even a giant of leader would have been able to withstand it and survive in his job.
Nawaz must understand his jiggery-pokery is too slim. He has to do a lot to rehabilitate himself with the masses. Such hogwash as democracy per se being an answer to the country’s all problems is too shallow to wash with a deeply sceptical public. It is ideas to get over them counts for all. Those he must spell out, if any, given his proverbial intellectual superficiality. Otherwise, he should spare this harried nation of his absurd talk.