Gets funnier all the time

Go to YouTube, through a proxy server if you must, and click ‘Pak Tower in Ilford’ and you’ll see two tall tower blocks (plazas as we like to call them here) rising into the East London sky – proud possessions, as you would have guessed, of the latest in our long line of saviours.

I am coming late to this, many people knowing this for some time. My first reaction was a bit of Pakistani outrage, can’t they ever stop? Then I burst out laughing, realising that there is just no cure for this Pakistani malady. Those being screwed by economic hardship, their patience never seems to run out. While those at the top, their greed never stops. You’d think they have everything, but they want more….and more.

These are the same folk who are selling us patriotism and the great love of the nation, and asking expatriates and foreigners to invest in Pakistan when they themselves have the infinite good sense to take their money abroad and keep it there. Of Park Lane flats we had known. Now the Towers of Ilford, and the property business in London never coming to a stop, even as copious tears are shed for the state of the nation. (And the nation awaits strong denials, even some clarifications. They have not come thus far.)

There is an affidavit lying somewhere in NAB about money laundering, fake bank accounts opened in London, and money squirrelled away from here, and then rerouted back to Pakistan to settle some of the multitude of bank loans taken over many fruitful years by the saviour family. Dar, sharp man that he is, lost no time in squealing when picked up by the FIA after the Musharraf takeover.

His revelations must still be around somewhere but, the seasons having changed, who will take note of them?

Not that the folk we are talking about were ever such fools as to return all bank loans. Perish the thought. Decades-old loans from the National Bank and other institutions not returned, on the strength of outrageous technicalities…banking quibbles raised to the status of fine art. (Told so often, there is no point in repeating this story.) Against this background, another tower or two in London…what’s that between friends?

Hence, with so much cleverness going around, it’s wrong to say they are dumb. Knowing so well how to butter your bread is no sign of dumbness. Still, setting yourself up as the nation’s last hope at the same time is no easy act to perform. Not everyone can do it.

But that the people in question were able to get away with it was in large measure because of President Zardari and his charmed circle, their corruption and incompetence so blatant that they made their successors look like saints. Just as Imran Khan makes them look like academic geniuses. And all these worthies together make Pervez Musharraf look like a rocket scientist. I read somewhere he is about to write another book. God help us.

So these are our national rescue teams and we are expecting that they will turn around the nation, beset by terrorism and rising economic woes as it is. What an embarrassment of riches: Zardari and now those after him, and Pakistan’s prime innocent, Imran Khan…and nothing else on the horizon, except the TTP and Hakimullah Mehsud, and the insurgents of Balochistan.

It took Zardari five years to destroy the PPP, a task Gen Zia could not accomplish over a longer period with lashes and systematic repression. The present lot have exposed themselves in a hundred days, their talents, many and varied, dwarfed by the nature of the country’s problems. The economy continues to drift, Ishaq Dar presiding over the swiftest decline in the rupee’s value in recent years. And they don’t have a clue how to tackle terrorism and the wages of extremism we have amassed over the years.

Traders are happy, as are capitalist robber barons, chiefs of the cement mafia and the like. This is their own government, protective of their interests. The rest of the country is getting it in the neck, prices of everything climbing, the rupee sinking, and public frustration mounting. Electricity tariffs are set to rise again.

But such is the Talleyrand scope of the prime minister’s imagination that oblivious to these troubles he is focused on one thing, the wooing of an Indian prime minister who is virtually a lame-duck in his own country. Manmohan Singh’s own party has not much time for him. The Indian media treats him as a figure of ridicule. Yet Pakistan’s prime minister goes overboard trying to engage him. The outcome of this master diplomacy: zero plus zero, as any fool could have predicted. But who’s to tell our PM and the experts around him?

Not that we shouldn’t try to improve India relations. But there is a time and place for everything. Our number one problem today is not India. There are no immediate problems with India to solve, no breakthroughs expected. Demanding all our attention is the turmoil at home, the threat of terrorism, giving a lead to the army, putting some life into the nation, firing up its dead soul, eschewing gimmicky (like laptops, to give but one example) and concentrating on essential tasks.

But no, even as Peshawar is laid waste by Taliban terrorism, the PM spends precious days addressing meaningless gatherings in New York, delivering speeches no one is likely to remember, and pursuing lame-duck Manmohan Singh. The luxury of time that Pakistani prime ministers seem to have. Yusuf Raza Gilani and Pervaiz Ashraf were figures out of comic opera. Sharif, a man of more substance, and this is his performance. This is the leadership we have, and this their sense of priorities.

Just as it took five years for Zardari to destroy the PPP, are we going to see the PML-N’s departure into the shades over a similar period of time? Is our history only to be about exposures? Army inadequacies exposed, ISI follies exposed, political corruption and ineptitude exposed? At the end of all this exposure we may attain the light of the Buddha but how does it solve our problems? How does it leave us any better?

I am scared of the frequency with which this question is asked these days: will Pakistan survive? You get total strangers coming up to you and putting this question. And I say to myself what absolute nonsense and then I think of Yugoslavia and my heart misses a beat. When we were young it seemed such a powerful country and its leader, Marshal Tito, was such a figure on the world stage. He was hugely respected and he had seen so much, leading his partisans against the German occupation during the Second World War, and later, to Stalin’s fury, defying him. If someone had told me then that soon the Yugoslavia we knew would be no more I would have called him mad.

And I served in Moscow in the mid-seventies when the Soviet Union was such a powerful country. I am not joking but the cobblestones in the old streets around the Kremlin exuded authority and power. When the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, spoke, the world listened. Who could have imagined that in little more than a decade this powerful empire, in terms of territory the largest country in the world, would disintegrate and the triumphant West would make fun of it, and western historians with half-baked theories would proclaim the end of history?

All this came to pass not in ancient textbooks but before our eyes and we think that whatever our follies, how absolute our inadequacies, history’s destructive currents will spare us and pass us by.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com