Since we’re on the topic, this week, of people being embarrassed by past statements, let us not forget the don of puff pieces in Islamabad journalism, Saleh Zaafir. One of his gems was featured in this very space in the Media Watch column a couple of weeks ago.
Mr Zaafir does not merely defend Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government, but worships it. The way North Korean officials, when showing foreign visitors around Pyongyang, say that Kim Jong-Un always gets a hole-in-one whenever he is on a golf-course; or that he hit a bulls-eye on a shooting range that his late father took him to when he was seven-years-old; or that Kim Jon-Il, the present dictator’s father, was so clean that he did not defecate. This last one I am not making up; it was on the late dictator’s biography on the official North Korean website.
Well, our man in Islamabad, Saleh Zaafir, isn’t quite there yet, but is certainly getting there. Consider, for instance, the premier’s return from Tajikistan. Mr Zaafir writes that the plane’s mere arrival in Pakistan changed the weather. “Aasman par gehra abar chaa gaya.” That did away with the heat wave that the country had been seeing for some time. The prime minister’s arrival is a good luck talisman, he quotes some random khatoonas saying.
Well, as the poet says, “Yaad-e-maazi azaab hai, ya rabb…..chheen le mujh se haafiza mera…(memories of the past are a curse, my Lord….wrest my memory from me).
The internet always remembers. Someone from the legion of readers increasingly amused by the Mughal-era courtier disposition that the journalist has acquired for the Sharifs has posted on the internet a clipping of a news story he had filed for Jang back in ‘99, a day after the coup.
Nawaz Sharif has been transferred to the Attock prison, he informs the readers. And video films and “jinsi ashiaa” had been recovered from the Prime Minister’s House. The term “video films”, whenever it is used in the vernacular press, always — always — refers to porn.
What was meant by “jinsi ashiaa”, it is still not known. Years later, in the previous government, during a spat between the then leader of the opposition Chaudhry Nisar and the MQM, Waseem Akhtar also referred to the incident and had said “sex ki cheezein” had been recovered from the Sharifs’ rooms in ‘99. Again, Waseem Akhtar would have only been quoting this report of Zaafir’s and not known himself.
Even the intrepid reporter himself wouldn’t have been there at the time of the raid, but would merely have been informed by an official in the newjunta. So, in the interests of responsible journalism, Mr Zaafir should confirm his 17-year-old story and ask the prime minister himself