- Why would anyone wish to be the prime minister of Pakistan?
On the eve of elections that are as sordid as these — it is best to keep the similes to oneself in the current atmosphere – some depressing questions must occur to most people: Why would anyone wish to be the prime minister of Pakistan? Why put yourself in that position when it is faced with such an uphill task? Is being preceded by sirens and accompanied by most of the constabulary of the county of such crucial importance to anyone’s ego? It seems to be, even though most of the PMs of this country have been humiliated, and either dismissed, disqualified, assassinated, or in ZA Bhutto’s case, imprisoned and hung.
There’s only over half the males and less than half the females literate in Pakistan, a huge number in a massive population growing further out of hand. Most of these people, if they vote, will barely know how to hold a pen when casting their ballot. There’s the health of our future generation at risk since more than 31pc of the children under five are underweight, and the incidence of infant death at birth is terribly high. Why put yourself in a position where you must try to bring down the country’s currently major risk of disease, food and waterborne disease: bacterial diarrhea, hepatitis A and E, typhoid, of dengue, malaria and rabies? Where you must do something for the more than 130,000 persons now living with HIV/AIDS, about sanitation which is currently beyond mention awful, unavailable, not understood, about clean drinking water which is almost never available, about health facilities that are the pits? Why not simply work at a lesser position, in which you can make money hand over fist and then spend it on all the nihari your heart desires, or on halvas, donuts or molten lava cakes?
Unless of course the elected person is able to ignore all that must be done, quite happily, and concentrate on the nihari, halvas, donuts or molten lava cakes so abundantly available in this land of the underfed. It’s what has happened these past seventy years, its likely to be what keeps happening, regardless of who succeeds in pulling off their game, even if the biggest landlord in the country manages to incarcerate all the irritants from the one party and put its own stooge on the stage. Will that stooge turn out to be not a stooge after all – which means more tensions all around – because really, the stooge cannot watch his tongue and has strange ‘religious’ notions that might lead to unwelcome consequences? Will the wily fox grin his way onto the stage once again? Will women be pushed further back into their homes and hirsute males carry sticks in the streets? Will some persons not counted among the mainstream be required to display the equivalent of the star of David on their chests by law and the rest burnt or beaten to death? Will this poor defeated nation ever, ever get a leader who cares about the people in addition to himself, and visualise the people as human rather than ATM machines?
Will the CJ ever learn to – er – rest his case?
Politics is inherently deceptive, but it need not be quite as two-faced as it is now, nor as foggy as to who stands to gain. For the first time one votes not for the better man – there isn’t one, unless you speak of a young human rights activist
Politics is inherently deceptive, but it need not be quite as two-faced as it is now, nor as foggy as to who stands to gain. For the first time one votes not for the better man – there isn’t one, unless you speak of a young human rights activist, hum sub may say sirf aik, a lawyer and an independent candidate. Instead we vote for those who have been unfairly targeted. It’s a roundabout way of thumbing your nose at the perpetrators of this confusion, of telling them to git, to mind the peripheries as they are supposed to be doing.
Is it the Garden greeting the Spring,
Or the Prison opening its doors?
Listen –
From which direction arises the song of glee?
Faiz Ahmad Faiz: translated by Sain Sucha
Who knows what awaits this country? Does anyone know what is happening anymore?
The suspense between killers and weapons as they gamble:
Who will die and whose turn is next?
That bet has now been placed on me
So bring the order for my execution
I must see with whose seals the margins are stamped
Recognise the signatures on the scroll
Faiz Ahmad Faiz