It’s the first meeting of the cabinet. The scene is tense. The kitty, we are led to believe, is empty. The power crisis hits at us unabated. The terrorists are at the gate and the new government is finally realising how riddled with holes is the strategy of merely ‘talking’ to ‘them’ is.
What is to be the first order of business? No, first let’s have the tilawat, as is the norm and then wrestle with these problems. Now the aforementioned recitation is not done by a maulana sahib but is a tape-recorded video with the text being displayed on the screen.
The PM objects! This is un-Islamic, he said. Plus, there’s no translation on the screen! One of the cabinet members, considered religious, said that it wasn’t un-Islamic, at least not that he’d heard of. Furthermore, he pointed out that there was, in fact, translation on the screen.
But our premier wasn’t sold. No, he said. From now on, the tilawat is going to be performed by cabinet members on rotation.
Two more cabinet meetings have taken place after the inaugural one. No reports on who those two cabinet members were.
