–PTI is not very interested. Nawaz isn’t involved, so who cares?
I’m surprised no one has drawn the links between the attacks on Data Sahib and those in Colombo. No one has accused anyone of carrying out the attacks in response to the Colorado school shooting or drawn any comparisons between Lahore and Christchurch.
Well, obviously all except the Colorado school shooting were at test centres, so instead of white supremacists, maybe we should look at those who don’t like cricket. Maybe a rabid soccer enthusiast. Now they make much more money in both sports, but once professionals used to play both sports, so that they were employed year-round, rather than having nothing to do in the off-season.
I think Denis Compton was the last leading exponent of this tradition, back in the 1940s, while I think all-rounder Ian Botham played one season for a Third-Division side. Wonder what Botham, who was a contemporary of Imran Khan’s, is doing? He’s certainly not British PM. He was a safe hand in the slips, but even he would have been hard put to handle Brexit properly.
Everyone thinks the Data Sahib attack was on the police. I don’t know. There were a lot of people paying respects at the shrine. Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar was there to pay his respects on April 23, while Mian Nawaz Sharif was there at the beginning of Ramzan.
It substituted for his more customary Umra, but this year, you see, he couldn’t leave the country. I am reminded of the Lahori who went for Hajj, but caught a fever. He promptly phoned home and told his relatives to offer a degh [charity food] at Data Sahib for his recovery.
Well, Mian Nawaz was taken back to jail after his bail expired, in what appeared a pretty big procession. He remained untreated, though it was not clear if he had offered a degh for his recovery. There was apparently a large procession, and it was certainly risky for the government.
There’s been a lot of inflation, and the heat has meant that tempers are running high. It’s reached a point where any crowd, anywhere, could become an anti-government gathering. It would just have to decide to protest.
Well, one of the pluses for the government has been that the weather has been deceptively mild. Ramzan hasn’t brought any of the dramatic rainstorms and so on, and fasting has hardly been a snap, but it’s not as bad as we thought it would be.
Milder weather means fewer torchings of WAPDA offices, though Science and Technology Minister Fawad Chaudry still wants a calendar based on calculations for predicting the lunar calendar. Seems he wants to be called Mufti Fawad.
One thing we don’t want is something that happened in Saudi Arabia, which depends on a table-based calendar, some years back, when the Shawwal moon became visible a day early.
The King (then Fahd ibn Abdel Aziz) had to come on TV, announce that Eid would be celebrated the next day, and that everyone would fast the day after that to make up for the fast that had been lost, and that there would be prayers in all mosques for forgiveness, because that fast had obviously been lost as a punishment. If that was to happen here, who would make the speech? Mufti Fawad? Or King Imran?
Well, I don’t if know he would make the speech or not, but he was certainly busy putting in place more members of his economic team. I don’t know whether Imran picked Shabar Zaidi as FBR Chairman, or Ali Baqir as SBP Governor, or the IMF, or the selection committee which picked Hafeez Sheikh as his Finance Adviser, but I do know that neither the Sipah Sahaba nor the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were responsible
The interesting thing is that so far, none of the local facilitators seem to have been arrested. Maybe they kept the FIA people happy. Of course, the PTI is not very interested. Nawaz isn’t involved, so who cares?
And don’t blame Iran. Shabbar Zaidi should know how to raise revenue, for he had spent a lifetime, as Fergusons’ main man, stopping revenue being collected. He’s a tax consultant. He knows where the bodies are buried. And Ali Baqir was busy destroying Egypt, a primarily Sunni country, as IMF head of mission, before coming here. Anyhow, the people they replaced were obviously corrupt elements.
There’s a TV clip doing the rounds in which Shabbar Zaidi appears in a TV programme and says that no one wants to become FBR Chairman for the pay, so someone from the private sector would only join for the wrong reasons. He’s not taking any salary, so why is he doing it? For his health, I suppose.
Something else that was probably done for one’s health was the Chinese brides scandal, where the FIA, not yet headed by someone from the private sector, was busy doing its bit for Pak-China friendship. It seems some Chinese marriage brokers were selling Pakistani girls as brides for Chinese men. The girls, mostly from Christian families, found things were not what they seemed in China, and it seems there was a prostitution ring at work.
Well, one had heard of mail-order brides before, but it was either in the US Far West in the 19th century, when the prairies were being settled, or Russian women going to the USA after the collapse of the USSR. What was not entirely clear was whether the marriages were part of the CPEC, or the wider BRI. The latter seems likely, for other Asian countries were reporting similar events.
The interesting thing is that so far, none of the local facilitators seem to have been arrested. Maybe they kept the FIA people happy. Of course, the PTI is not very interested. Nawaz isn’t involved, so who cares?
The PTI is busy watching the South African elections, which the African National Congress has won, despite the corruption scandals around it, which had forced the previous President to resign. What was missing to overturn that tottering wall was a sit-in. The problem with South Africa, though, is they do not need Imran. They could just ask one of their ex-players to do the needful.
