There He Goes Again
YOU cannot hold Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan for long, can you? He is warming up to his ' go government , go' task (self-appointed) once again. I think more press conferences have been held at his Nicholson Road residence here than at any other place in the country. In fact, it should be named Press Conference House. Atop it should fly a black flag with a white death's-head in the middle carrying a " No government is good government" legend around it.
The Nawabzada is at present the ' patron' of the Pakistan Awami Ittehad (PAI) in which honourable capacity he held his latest press conference the other day. On this momentous occasion, the Nawabzada (all his press conferences are momentous occasions) predicted that a change (of government ) was " bound to take place because of public pressure. "
More often than not, when this compulsive-impulsive politician uses the term ' public pressure' it means his own personal pressure. There was no public pressure on Mrs . Benazir Bhutto to resign in 1990 but Nasrullah Khan insisted there was and president Ghulam Ishaq Khan obliged by sacking the lady.
There was no public pressure on Mr. Nawaz Sharif to quit in 1993 but Nasrullah insisted there was. President Ghulam Ishaq Khan obliged once again and Mr. Nawaz Sharif had to go despite being restored by the Supreme Court. So Mr s. Bhutto returned. In 1996, there was no public pressure on Mr s. Bhutto to quit but President Farooq Leghari thought otherwise and Mr. Nawaz Sharif got his massive mandate in February last year.
It may be recalled here that there was no Nasrullah pressure on Mr. Leghari. In the only brilliant move made by Mr s. Bhutto , Nasrullah Khan was well and truly muzzled. She simply made him head of the Kashmir committee and asked him to lead " convince the world of the righteousness of our cause" delegations to whatever country he wanted to visit.
Nasrullah Khan for once had some work to do. Indeed, he got so busy he forgot he had demanded Mrs . Bhutto 's head only less than three years ago. The lady took his teeth out and ruled with a measure of equanimity till the man in the House on the Hill fell out with her. But today, back at his old game, Nawabzada Nasrullah says Mr. Nawaz Sharif 's government has been given enough time to prove its worth.
Now he says Pakistan should not sign the CTBT unless the Kashmir issue is resolved. He says his Kashmir delegations had told the countries they had visited that since Pakistan had attained a nuclear capability, the possibility of an exchange of atomic crackers with India could not be ruled out.
No matter what the quarrel between India and Pakistan , no one in his right senses can even think of a nuclear war between the two countries. And a nuclear war over Kashmir ? Good heavens, no! And where will Pakistan use its atomic bomb(s)? In occupied Kashmir? Over New Delhi or Bombay or Ahmedabad or Lucknow ? Where will India throw its bombs in Pakistan? Lahore ? Karachi ? Islamabad ?
A bomb of the size that destroyed Hiroshima or Nagasaki will kill twenty times as many people in India or Pakistan because most areas in the two countries are heavily populated. I tell you only a Nawabzada can say that a nuclear war in the subcontinent cannot be ruled out. And for laughs he says Pakistan should not depend on other countries for (conventional?) weapons.
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DID you read Philippe Chatrier 's views on the ace service in tennis in Dawn recently? These are worth recalling here. The service ace, he thinks, is an abomination. The service, he adds, should be no more than a hello; the ace is a full stop. No one could have put it more succinctly. M. Chtarier, I think, is a former ITF president .
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HERE now a few quotes from Mickey Spillane 's ancient thriller, The Long Wait , from the fifties.
" Never any trouble from the people? "
" There would have been at one time. There still would be if the damn public would get the merchants out of politics and run the show them s elves. What the hell, you can't blame them too much. There's a lot of new money in town now if you can stand to live with the kind of people who have it. . . .
I've had to live under laws set up by a pack of ignorant . . . (expletive deleted) who take all the cream and throw the rest to the people who vote for them . . . whoever is at the top pulling strings does it under the neatest cover you ever saw. There's more money in this town than you can imagine, but it isn't going down into any books. We've had the Feds in here and boys from the attorney-general's office trying to get to the bottom of it and they all come up shaking their heads . . . they try it on the mayor and the city council and what happens? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nobody knows from nothing. "
Again,
" Now you got friends, Johnny . Now you got friends who can pull writs out of a hat early in the morning because a judge is afraid of getting in wrong with the press. "
And finally,
" Your cops make more in shakedowns than salary; so they take orders from somebody else. "
Makes one wonders whether the locale for the Spillane novel was Lahore , 1998, or a U.S. city circa 1956.
Sunday , July 12, 1998
