You know, the Pakistan cricket team must be grateful that Moin Khan went to a casino, and thus drew attention from it to him, leading even to his having to come home. Well, it seems he has serious issues. He might well claim he had only gone to get something to eat. Well, surely there were restaurants he could go to. Hackles were probably raised not just because of its being a casino, but because of the gambling scandals of the past. It seems that Moin didn’t just need to eat, but also to gamble. That might shed an unwelcome light on Imran Khan, who had been his captain in 1992. Was that Cup in the book?
Moin certainly seems to be following his skipper. Remember how Imran met his wife in her mother’s nightclub? He said he had gone there to preach Islam. Moin shouldn’t have said he was there to get dinner. He should have said he had gone to convert the dealers. He had taken his wife along. Yes, the lady he beat up while under the influence not too long ago. Wife-beating, drinking, gambling. I said he has issues. I don’t know if he took along his wife because she was hungry too, or because he wanted her along to express himself while drowning his sorrows at the performance of the team he had picked, or if she insisted on going so that he wouldn’t make an exhibition of himself. Well, she wasn’t beaten this time.
Mr Justice (retd) Rana Bhagwandas had already died, so it couldn’t have been Moin’s fault, but Leonard Nimoy died later. Moin is of the generation that grew up on Star Trek, and even if not a Trekkie himself, will understand the condolences offered by this writer to all Trekkies everywhere (not just on Earth) on the death of the original Spock, and the wish that Moin ‘live long and prosper’.
Mr Justice (retd) Rana Bhagwandas did not quite mean that another Chief Justice had died, but he came as close as anyone had done since A.R. Cornelius had been Chief Justice. Last week, Dr Justice (retd) Nasim Hssan Shah had passed on, so Mr Justice (retd) Bhagwandas’ passing meant that the times were hard on heads, no matter how temporary, of Pakistan’s judiciary.
Still, Moin should thank his stars. At least no one has accused him of buffalo theft. Or the modern equivalent, sexual harassment, or rape. The former is the charge against Rajendra Pachauri, who resigned as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after an employee of the Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi, of which he is also chairman, accused him of sexual harassment. He is 64, she is 27. She says he did his harassment by email, he says his accounts have been hacked. At a time when the whole world is preparing for a summit in December on climate change, in Paris, the IPCC is rudderless. In the old days, the police would accuse him of stealing the local headman’s buffalo. Now it is sexual harassment.
Moin might also speculate about the role played by jealousy. A lot of the outrage has been fuelled by those who wondered why Moin was in a casino when they weren’t. I suspect that that’s the spirit at work in all the breast beating over the Senate elections. All those party leaders can’t stand their MPAs making a little money on the side. And with party leaders not being MPAs, they can’t stand mere MPAs profiting from their status. I mean, the whole system of Senate elections is designed to ensure that smaller provinces’ MPAs can make money by charging to buck the party line in favour of independent candidates. Imran Khan and Mian Nawaz Sharif didn’t like this, since their Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa and Balochistan MPAs stood to cash in when they weren’t making any money themselves.
Of course, while that drama had a limited audience of really involved people (MPAs willing to sell their votes, and Senate candidates willing to buy them), there were thousands affected by the goof-up over the Primary English paper. There were even more people affected by the Ordinance allowing presiding officers at courts martial to order closed trials. The ability of military officers to conduct trials was under question, now their honest mistakes are to be played out in private. Another use of the military would be to get them to send a team to Australia and replace those guys, who can barely beat Zimbabwe. Would you catch a military man in a casino? Well, he would probably go there, in the company of an American and an Afghan officer, but he would make sure he wasn’t caught, at least not by civilians. By the way, there’s also an Afghanistan team at the World Cup, which has not been found to have anyone at the casino along with Moin. And the connection between the military and the national cricket team is not new, Lt Col Shujauddin having been a Test all-rounder, batting a bit and bowling left-arm spin. He became a commentator after his playing days, a very good example of a post-retirement second career.
The military had nothing to do with the massacre in Tyrone, Missouri, where a middleaged man is suspected of shooting six people before turning his gun on himself after his mother died, aged 74. One wonders why neither blacks nor militants were blamed. Or why the American military is not trying the criminals.