Interestingly, the Sharif Brothers of Raiwind and the Chaudhrys of Gujarat are nowadays enacting a ludicrous comedy show, which is quite funny not just for its hilarity but no lesser for its absurdity. Scripted on their pasts that are no splendid but more or less ugly, they are accusing one another of being hypocrites and the military rulers’ erstwhile sidekicks. And while the Sharifs are debunking the Chaudhrys for snuggling up in Pervez Musharraf’s praetorian lap, the Chaudhrys in turn are reminding the Sharifs not to forget that they themselves were the garrison hatcheries’ cloned babies and dictator Ziaul Haq’s blue-eyed boys. Both may be thinking with their tirades they are making a mark with the street against one another.
But in reality their matinee comedy show is highlighting yet more poignantly this nation’s colossal tragedy. It needs leaders. Instead, it has petty operators and manipulators. At this point in time of its dire predicament, it essentially requires giant statesmen of tremendous vision, farsightedness, wisdom and maturity. Instead, in the field are dwarfs who are no politicians either and intellectually so barren that they cannot see even beyond their noses. Mediocre they are congenitally, but great pretenders they are compulsively. They are just incapable of seeing through the thickness of stupendous problems confronting the nation and coming to grips with their enormities. No wonder, they throw in populist recipes where hard-thought measures are needed necessarily.
What else could it be that the Sharif Brothers are shouting noisily in these days that by gifting laptops to hundreds of thousands “lucky” students they are spawning an educational revolution in their domain of Punjab? What lunacy of thought could be greater than this when they will be blowing away tens of billions of rupees of the taxpayer’s precious money on this foolish pork barrel? This huge dough they could have spent well by giving science teachers and science laboratories to government schools, a huge lot of which is bereft of this indispensable facility even in urban centres, leave alone the countryside where the state-run schools by and large know of no science teaching at all.
Indeed, the two brothers, who seem to have given themselves to the exulting belief that they are innately administrators par excellence with no peers among the present crop of politicos to rival them in this skill, have not the foggiest of idea what a gigantic mess of education has become on their domain and how much of innovative and creative ideas and painstaking labours are needed to clear this up?
Not that the Chaudhrys are any better. On their watch, they too had burnt away billions of rupees just on an image-building media campaign under the cover of a spurious literacy motivation drive. They had promised a para likha punjab. They departed leaving it as uneducated and illiterate as it was when they had walked in. And if for an inherently political errand the Sharifs are remorselessly playing shifty with the taxpayer’s money, the Chaudhrys did the same to the same end with no compunctions to the Work Bank’s money it had loaned out to improve the schooling in Punjab.
The people are least pushed about if the Chaudhrys were a dictator’s buddies or the Sharifs the praetorian generals’ chums. Whatever masks the present crop of the politicos may don, they can’t deceive our people, who know for a fact that most of these luminaries have been the generals’ sidekicks in one way or the other and the net beneficiaries of the garrisons’ generosities. The people know they all are chips of the same block. But they expect them to at least do something to ameliorate their miserable conditions a little bit to make their miserable lives a bit livable.
Certainly, the Chaudhrys will be cutting a very cruel joke with the denizens of Punjab if they insist on their watch they had transformed it into a model of progress and prosperity, although, candidly speaking, they did undertake quite a lot of development work. And the Sharifs only grate on the Punjab residents’ minds unbearably with their shrill incessant chiming that they are working feats on their domain in the service of the public. Works speak for themselves; they need no media whiz kids or media managements to tell of them. People feel them in their daily lives and need no media managers to know of this.
And if the people’s own experiences are any tellers, they feel no betterment in their lots. It is the same, even worse, than what it was when the Chaudhrys were at the helm in Punjab. It is not just the monumental mess on the education plateau that mocks scornfully at the Sharifs’ tall claims. Everything there is in a mess, be it healthcare, public services, administration, development or law and order. People see only a change, not for the better, but for the worse.
Perhaps, the Sharifs would do well to change their discourse, and talk less of praetorian loyalties, where they stand on a very weak wicket, and talk more why are they failing to deliver where they should have to show themselves better than the Chaudhrys. The Chaudhrys can afford to talk loose as they are not in rule, not even in the centre where they not in a lead role. The Sharifs have a lot of explaining to do for their nonperformance. The Chaudhrys are not so pathetically placed.
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