You don’t travel in the cattle class once you’ve found favour with the furies. If someone up there likes you, the rules don’t apply to you, nor do you have to put up with less than stellar standards. If Mansoor Ijaz had the personal security guarantees of no less than the interior minister himself, he is in a good position, one that many from the country, in these lawless times, would give an arm and a limb for. But that won’t be good enough. Reports are emerging that it is the army that is to be deployed to protect the US national. Other reports, unverified till date but not beyond the realm of possibility, say that he is going to land not at BB International, that den of plebeians, but at the military airport in Chaklala. It appears, claimed an exasperated Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani yesterday, that a viceroy is coming over to survey his dominion.
As usual, it’s a bit of a circus. The US national’s recent appearance in a raunchy wrestling video doesn’t change anything on the ground but only serves to lend a quaintly surreal air to the whole episode. To say this is right out of the movies would be a stretch because they don’t make movies like these anymore; perhaps Latin American soap operas would be a more apt comparison.
But even those facets of Mr Ijaz’s past, the ones that bear some connection to the country, like his other interviews where he trashes Pakistani intelligence agencies and armed forces, take a backseat when compared to, apparently, the only thing in the universe that matters: his revelations about the matter of the memo.
There is a thesis that non-democratic forces grew weaker and weaker in Turkey with every successive coup whereas the opposite happened in Pakistan. In Turkey’s case, the trajectory culminated in a failed coup. In Pakistan’s case, if there aren’t any valid grounds to disrupt a sitting government, one can be created.