Delusions of grandeur

He was always given to hyperbole. Naturally, Shoaib Shaikh, the middle-class kid from Faisalabad didn’t found a humongous and shady diploma mill on the basis of calling a spade a spade. No, he would call a spade a million spades.

Consider the initial spiel for why Axact was launching a news channel. We were actually planning on doing the publicity for the philanthropic ventures of our organisation, the man had said. The total spend of that publicity (not the philanthropy itself, mind you) was so large that we decided that we might as well start a channel of our own! How’s that for hyperbole?

Well, he showed some more of that aggrandisation when talking to reporters outside the courtroom when appearing in the Axact case.

The reporter, obviously with a cheeky bent of mind, asks him how he once said that he is going to make Pakistan “the world’s number one country” – whatever that means – by 2036, no less. What was your vision in bringing that about, he asks.

Well, three hundred years ago, the GDP of India was more than 24 per cent of the world, during Aurangzeb Alamgir’s tenure; why can’t we bring that about again?

This is one of the arguments that we of the formerly colonised sub-continent bring up when the other side talks about how the British gave us things like the railways (though a better foot forward would be the legal system that has a codified system of human rights). After you lot left, we tell the British, the sub-continent became the basketcase that it then became.

This is true, but morals aside, much happened in the intervening 300 years, including the development of the steam engine and the subsequent industrial revolution in the west, vastly boosting the west’s GDP. India would have still been better off economically with no colonisation and its own attempts at modernisation.

This is not a delusion of grandeur. The delusion of grandeur is the word that Shaikh used for India: “Greater Pakistan.”

Yes, the sub-continent is greater Pakistan. No wonder why the deep state was and is so enamoured with Bol. The concept of an Indian Muslim master race is the sort of thing that would make their hearts flutter.