(Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. Learn to take a joke; you’ll live longer.)
The national bar for ‘good news’ for the nation’s liberal democrats was officially lowered this week to mean the end of the seemingly arbitrary incarceration of two members of the National Assembly who, between them, represent close to 900,000 citizens of the Islamic Republic.
MNAs Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir, who are elected from NA-48 and NA-50 respectively, were in detention for an incident in the Kharqamar area, the details of which are murky, with none of the national television channels running the cellphone videos of the incident that the two MNAs’ supporters made the aforementioned day.
“The release of these two, yes, is good news, technically,” said Dr Faiz Hassan, a Peshawar-based lecturer and rights’ activist. “But why were they arrested in the first place? That, too, with no one giving a proper explanation of the charges against them.”
This lowering of the bar for good news for the nation’s liberal democrats follows a similar lowering of the bar for good news for the nation’s ultra-nationalists. That bar was lowered to the failure of the Indian mission to the moon, which was celebrated throughout the country
