Of a Sullen Handshake and Horse-Trading

"HOW do you do?" asked the President . "I am all right, by the Grace of Allah ," replied the Prime Minister . "And how are you?" asked the Prime Minister. "I, too, am fine," replied the President.

          The occasion? Just after the funeral prayers for the martyrs of Mogadishu in Islamabad  on Wednesday. Both Mr. Ghulam Ishaq Khan  and Mr. Nawaz Sharif  were tense. There was a sullen handshake but no meeting of hearts. Throughout the sombre ceremony, the two ignored each other, but perhaps protocol demanded that they should be seen side by side in the front row of the Namaz-i-Janaza. And this, Willy Nilly, the two had to do.

          And the two are Muslims , just imagine. One would have thought that after a grim national loss, the two would forget the rancour they nurse for each other, at least for the duration of the last rites for the officers and men who had lost their lives in far away Somalia . Since I saw the whole thing on television, I cannot overrule the evidence of my eyes. I am ashamed for both of them. The President , at least, should have realised that the man he had taken on since the beginning of the year was half his age.

          Turncoats : They are called lotas in this part of the world. Now, there was this very interesting story in a local Urdu  language newspaper on Thursday. It traces the history of turn coatism in the Punjab  and claims that Dr. Mohammad Alam , a noted lawyer of his day, was the first of the breed.

          Dr. Alam won the 1937 election from a Rawalpindi  constituency on a ticket given to him by Maulana Zafar Ali Khan 's Nili Posh Tehrik . He changed loyalties even before he had been sworn in as a member of the Assembly and joined the All India  Congress . He later became the deputy leader of the Congress opposition in the House.

          Then in 1940, he joined the Muslim  League only to go over to Sir Sikandar  Hayat Khan 's side, four years later. He lost the 1946 elections as an independent candidate. After the results had been announced, some young people decorated the entrance to his house with a string of lotas .

          So far as the Muslim  League is concerned, says the report, the party is 'self-sufficient' in lotas . But now every party has its own lotas . The PDA  has five, the Jamaat-i-Islami  and the ANP  have one each. Jam Sadiq Ali  won over 15 turncoats after the 1990 elections and ruled Sindh  with an iron hand.

          The report lists other terms for turncoats- lifafe (envelopes), ghorey  (horses), gadhey (donkeys), and girgit (chameleons). I do not know about lifafas and girgits , but the horse and the donkey have been man's best friends for centuries without count and should be treated with respect.

          I met a horse the other day. There were tears in its large and expressive eyes. I went up to it and asked,

          "What makes you so pensive this morning, dear horse?"

The horse turned its face away. "Leave me in peace," it said.

          "I can't leave you in peace because you are not at peace with yourself or with the world," I said.

          "Why are you interested in the life of a miserable old horse?" it asked.

          "Because we have been friends for so long, and I must find out if I can be of any help to you. I don't like to see friends in distress," I persisted.

          "Well, then, if you must know, I have been reading the papers and I think all of them can be sued for libel," began the horse.

          "How?" I asked.

It is "It is like this. Whenever turncoats and fair-weather friends pollute the political atmosphere, the papers say that horse-trading is going on. It hurts me a great deal. Down the ages, the horse has been a one-man animal. You love it and it will be yours for life. The same is true of my poor cousin, the donkey. Treated cruelly and ridiculed and lashed and kicked and underfed, it has continued to serve its masters with rare devotion. But what has it got in return for its pains?" asked the horse, warming up to the subject in hand.

          "You do not understand, dear horse," I intervened. "You see when we say horse-trading is taking place; it's no aspersion on your loyalty. It is an aspersion on those who buy as noble an animal as you for personal advantage."

          "No, I don't agree," said the horse. "As I told you, the horse is a one-man animal. When it loves, it loves for life. The term horse-trading has a criminal origin. It started back in England  three or four hundred years ago or perhaps earlier. Now it means all under-the-table deals. It is an offence and is even under the present law of the land, cognisable. What I mean to say is that since a horse is incapable, by the grace of God , of committing crime or of being disloyal, horse-trading should be called man-trading."

          "I am a horse, not a man. A horse never sold a fellow-horse. A horse never betrayed a fellow-horse. And, moreover, no horse has ever known to be a parasite. I wish I could hire the services of Mr. S. M. Zafar  and sue all those who use the term horse-trading for libel. I tell you I have an open and shut case," concluded the horse, leaving me not a little ashamed of being a man.

Bosnia : The House Foreign Relations committee has decided by a vote of 24-15 to authorise the President  to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia and has sent its recommendations in this regard to the House of Representatives.

          Considering that the Serbs' Operation Ethnic Clean-up is over, or almost, this is a most magnanimous decision and proves once again that the United States  is indeed the leader of the Free World. Now that the Bosnians have lost most of their land, now that more than enough Bosnians have been killed or maimed for life and now that all of their girls and women have been raped, lifting the arms embargo is an invitation to them to fight so that the rest of them can be eliminated. Thank you America for this heart-warming act of compassion.

Friday, June 11, 1993