It would only be only right to quote the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, while talking of the removal from office of Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif: ’Subah kay takht nashin sham ko mujrim thahray/Hum nai pal bhar main taqdiron ko badaltay dekha’ (In the morning a crowned head, by evening a criminal/We’ve seen fates change in an instant). It’s appropriate both because Mian Nawaz cared enough about the Mughals to have their paintings placed in the old CM Secretariat at Freemason’s Hall (and to vandalise the Fort they built in honour of foreign dignitaries), and because he likes poetry. Indeed, he once said after listening to a ghazal that the difference between him and Ghulam Ishaq Khan was that he liked ghazals, the latter didn’t.
But let us not forget that Zafar too was made to suffer because of his sons. They had joined the Mutiny, and they had been executed at its end, when Zafar had abandoned the Delhi Fort. Mian Nawaz has been disqualified because he became Chairman of one of his son’s companies. And he was punished for the Mayfair flats they owned.
And while Ghulam Ishaq didn’t listen to ghazals, he was only the first to have removed Mian Nawaz from office as PM. Then came COAS Gen Pervez Musharraf. And now the Supreme Court. Like a bad penny, Mian Nawaz has always come back. Every time he has been written off. Every time, at least so far, like General Douglas Macarthur to the Philippines in World War II, he has returned. But it should also not be forgotten that Macarthur was also the US commander who did not return to Japan after he was sacked after the beginning of the Korean War.
It was also interesting to see the silence of former President Asif Zardari. Was that because he wanted to leave the PPP reaction in the hands of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, or because he wanted to avoid accusations of the pot calling the kettle black, or shall we say Mr Ten Percent. It seems as if the heavens themselves deplored the dismissal, for the first true monsoon downpour started around the time the Supreme Court announced its judgement. It wasn’t as calamitous as the flooding in Gujarat, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state, where 120 people were killed. That was far more than the 26 who died in the Lahore blast earlier in the week.
Mian Nawaz’s exit means Shahid Khaqan Abbassi becomes PM until Mian Shehbaz Sharif finds a seat in the National Assembly. Then will begin the search for a Punjab chief minister.
Some themes seem to recur round the world. Look at Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the late Uzbekistan strongman, Islam Karimov. Her jailing was announced for fraud, money laundering and possession of foreign currency. Like Mian Nawaz’s kids, she also had flats in London, and like Ishaq Dar’s, in Dubai. In fact, she headed a ‘gang’ with $1.3 billion in assets in 12 countries.
They weren’t ousting anyone in India. Instead, they were electing a new President, Kovind Ram, one of the BJP’s tame Dalits. He isn’t the first Dalit to become President, but the previous one, R.K. Narayanan, was elected by the Congress. Presumably, he won’t suffer the fate of Naveed Pathan, the Mumbai Muslim who was slaughtered by a sword-wielding crowd at a tea-stall. The tea-stall symbolism is apposite, for it was from one that Narendra Modi rose to the Prime Minister. Was Pathan’s killing anti-Muslim, or part of a gang war. Was he a bodybuilder only, or was he also a bhai? Our most famous bhai, Altaf Bhai, is not a bodybuilder. Well, not unless putting on weight counts as bodybuilding.
The Indian Supreme Court also had better things to do than oust Modi. Like dismissing the petition by the parents of a 10-year-old girl, who was impregnated after being raped by her uncle, for an abortion. The Indian Supreme Court is brave, because this refusal came on the heels of the discovery in a Madhya Pradesh village of a buried newborn, who had been buried alive by his mother, who had borne him illegitimately. Brave, because the child may be treated like that (if the little girl bearing it lives through the birth). Or optimistic, for the Madhya Pradesh baby lived…
While there has been no birth, there has been a revenge rape in Multan district, ordered by a panchayat. There was a rape. The case went to the panchayat. It ordered that the rapist’s sister be assaulted by the victim’s brother. He went ahead. If you were to ask him, he would probably shrug his shoulders and say he was only obeying the panchayat. More than a police investigation, the panchayat members need a psychiatric evaluation. After all, they have muddled up the qisas law, which provides for retaliation, with the adultery law, under which rapes were previously treated.
Still, though it does not seem that two wrongs can make a right (I mean, why should any woman have to suffer a criminal assault just because another girl suffered at the hands of her brother?), the Multan panchayat doesn’t seem to have trivialised women as much as the New Delhi man who killed his wife because she didn’t make gol rotis. It works both ways, as an Indian woman killed her husband in April because he wasn’t good-looking enough. As ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ I suspect that anyone could get killed if that became a common practice. That is like the woman who broke off her engagement because the groom couldn’t do a proper ‘snake dance.’ So men should be handsome snake-dancers, and wives must know how to make gol rotis, if both want to live.