Well here we had Imran Khan trying to set out on a career of quoting an author when a judge’s video exploded in his face, and distracted everyone from how he had quoted Ayn Rand recently.
We have become a literary nation, it seems, with a chief justice who quotes Mario Puzo (while he was quoting Balzac) and a PM quoting Ayn Rand.
A far cry from the Nawaz era, in which Mian Nawaz was actually anti-intellectual, and looked with suspicion at anyone who could read a calendar.
For some reason, probably because of her publishers trying to sell her books, Rand is known as something of a philosopher.
A long time ago, when Imran had not yet won the World Cup, PTV made a serial out of one of her books, the one Imran quoted from, The Fountainhead. It was about an architect who didn’t conform to the rules.
Well, it seems Judge Arshad Malik put paid to all Imran’s hopes of being remembered as the intellectual who became PM. He was the judge in the Azizia reference against Mian Nawaz, and allegedly confessed on video that he had been pressured into the decision by quarters which had a video of him in a compromising position when he was posted in Multan.
He has been repatriated by the chief justice of the Islamabad High Court back to the Lahore High Court. I wonder if he will be posted back to Multan.
He has conceded knowing the person seen with him in his confessional video, Nasir Butt. Nasir Butt has been acquitted in murder cases, and it is not known how he was acquainted with the judge so well that he confessed the involvement, and got involved in convivial sittings, in which he apparently swung what Wodehouse called ‘a dashed efficient shoe’, to the tune of a PTI campaign song.
It’s said that this judge’s video, which was disseminated by Mian Nawaz Sharif’s daughter Maryam, was meant to get the Islamabad High Court to order a retrial. It seems to have vexed Imran that Nawaz’s narrative has got traction.
Well, if Judge Malik, Justice (r) Javed Iqbal and any other judges who have been videotaped are anything to go by, there could be a better judiciary.
I wouldn’t be in any judge’s place nowadays, especially of one who hasn’t ever done anything wrong. Try convincing one’s wife of that. Judges might make decisions in their courtrooms, but I doubt if many wives are impressed.
Why else do they seek refuge in the houses of the Nasir Butts of this world?
And if you think judges have suspicious wives, what price the domestic life of every lawyer who appeared before Judge Malik? Lawyers must exert all their eloquence to get off. There seems no use being eloquent in court, not when the decision has already been made.
It seems that legal troubles are at work the world over. Imran might look forward to meeting US President Trump at the end of the moth, but Trump has just lost his Labor Secretary, who couldn’t explain the deal he made as US Attorney in a case involving the sex trafficking of minors with Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein has been accused again, giving rise to the impression that the first deal allowed him to prey yet again on minors.
This being held as an example of how wealth protects. Apparently, Americans don’t know how to handle these things. Epstein should not have had a deal; he should have walked scot free, after having had the SHO spoil the case.
And the medical evidence should have shown the victims were untouched. And there would have been birth certificates to prove that the victims were no longer minors.
Of course, that was a resignation Trump couldn’t stop. The one he probably welcomed was of the British ambassador, whose reports to the home government on Trump were both decidedly uncomplimentary, and made public.
He hung on for a few days, but as soon as he saw that he wouldn’t be supported by his home government, he resigned. He was lucky he wasn’t a Roman or else he would have had to fall on his sword.
Sarfraz Ahmed has not even left the Pakistan captaincy, let alone committed suicide. If he had set an example, maybe some other players might have done the honourable thing with a revolver, or with rat poison, or even with the old-fashioned cutthroat razors.
But old cricketers do much more, and never find a palmful of water to drown themselves in, whether or not they have won a World Cup, or built a cancer hospital.
Imran has done all of those. But he has not established a literary reputation. He showed though that he knows how to read. Maybe that’s why he made Hammad Azhar a minister.
He had heard he knew how to do sums. That was the problem with Asad Umar. He had reached algebra. And he not only lost the PM, but his job.
