Asma’s decision

“Never wrestle with a pig. You will get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” —Bernard Shaw

Asma Jehangir has decided not to appear in any televised debate with Ansar Abbasi. And, to make things dramatic, she announced this on CNBC’s Agenda 360, where she was to square off against her Jang Group bette noir, whom she had already faced on another programme. Neither of them was present in the studio; it was one of those live line and camera gigs. She simply announced her decision at the beginning of the programme and yanked off her collar mike.

Before we get into the merits of her decision, a word for the unsung heroes that make your TV experience possible: as a one-time TV hand, I can attest to how incredibly vexed the programme’s producer must have been. The programme for the 6th of April was supposed to be a simple give-them-the-mike-and-let-them-at-each-other affair. With one yank of the mike, the team was without a crucial 50 percent of the ingredients. They had to make do with Muhammad Malik, who, one assumes, was begged to appear on this short notice. What makes things worse was that according to the anchor, Jehangir had already known Abbasi would be on the programme when she had agreed to appear on the programme.

The question at hand: is her decision correct? In the larger scheme of how the discourse on Articles 62 and 63 is going to play out, no. It will merely cede more space to him. Even if she does appear on other programmes with other guests, as she did with lawyer Akram Sheikh on Saleem Safi’s Jirga, since it is she who is refusing to sit with Abbasi and not the other way around, he will always get way more airtime.

Agenda 360’s first three minutes are already being shared around on the social media by the conservatives who support Abbasi in general and always have an axe to grind with Jehangir in particular.

Furthermore, it has yielded him, rather than her, some sympathy. Which, in turn, has enabled him, as he did in a column in The News the other day, to put the cart before the horse. He accused those against him in the current ROs debate as unable to take dissenting views, the my-way-or-the-highway intransigent louts. In reality, as far as the arguments of the debate are concerned, it is he who refuses the other side to hold forth. Not only does he say the secularists cannot secularise the constitution even if they make it to the house with a resounding majority, he even went to the extent of saying on Geo’s Capital Talk that parties like the ANP, which are secular as per their manifesto, shouldn’t even be allowed to contest the elections in the first place!

Yet Asma’s pressing the eject button – premeditated, if we are to believe CNBC’s Haider Waheed – has placed the entire onus on the other side.

To put things into perspective: she is one of the nation’s leading lawyers. And lawyers have to appear before judges. She knows more than anyone else what unbelievable lightweights the latter are, how incredibly lacking their knowledge of the law has been found again and again, what irrelevant frivolities some of the leading lights of the higher judiciary bring up in the courts. Some recite poems and it is only a matter of time when the first Lordship breaks into song, much to the applause of the sycophantic press gallery.

Would she, under the same argument, stop appearing before them? Not a perfect analogy, of course, but I hope she reconsiders.

Post-script: Nitpicking here, but as a former editor, one pet peeve of mine is the misuse of the word “literally”. Since words had been blunted by overuse, the word literally was originally used to signify that a word is used as it appears in the dictionary. Imagine, then, Ansar Abbasi defending the vetting process of the candidates by drawing parallels with how things are done in the US. There, says the Editor Investigations of an English newspaper, “Senate committees ummeedwaro kay literally kaprray utar dete hayn!” (In the US, the senate committees literally take the candidates’ clothes off!)

If only the goings on in our parliament were as steamy.