Once more into the breach dear friends…
Are we condemned, then, to repeat history? Does the current gathering storm contain within it an all too familiar script, one that has proved, time and again in the course of our national existence, to be as inescapable as death itself?
Diplomacy is the currency of all spin doctors, the ISPR being no exception. When it issues a statement accusing a figure no smaller than the prime minister of lying, an act that will have “very serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences for the country” you know where the chips are going to fall. This is the considered opinion of the military?
Perhaps the bogey of “grievous consequences” is but a scare tactic, as some are suggesting. Eye-ball to eye-ball with the civil government, expecting them to blink. But decision to replace the defence secretary with a government loyalist makes it clear that the government has other ideas this time. This seems to have ratcheted the army’s ire higher, with the army chief calling a conference of principal staff officers today.
What led to the current impasse? The prime minister’s statement to a Chinese daily, stating the army chief and his spymaster did something illegal by submitting a reply directly to the Supreme Court. Discretion is the better part of valour; the premier could have reserved his opinions for either the local media or perhaps conveyed it to the military directly. The ISPR’s response, however, is disproportionate by all standards.
The cacophony isn’t complete without the vultures circling overhead. The role of the sensationalist mainstream media is, as always, far from ideal. What makes for good TV, what yields better ratings, does not necessarily bode well for the country itself. Rather than admonishing institutions that have crossed limits, the commentariat is moonlighting as cheerleaders.
Other pundits are frothing at the mouth and saying, in textbook chutzpah, that it is the army that is being hounded, that too at a time when they are fighting a war against terror. The situation on the ground, however, especially in the troubled north-west, tells another story. Since the establishment is hedging its bets in the latest instalment of the Great Game in Afghanistan, the militants have started regrouping; just the other day, a bomb blast in the Khyber agency killed 30 people, some days before that, the Taliban tortured and then killed 25 paramilitary soldiers.
Voices of reason need to prevail. The polity deserves uninteresting times.
