The Long and Short of the Lass and the Lad
APART from the many achievements of Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan and other politicians of his ilk, the one thing for which they deserve the greatest credit is that they have successfully jammed the nation's thought processes and prevented it from wasting its time on thinking about the real problems facing it.
I have before me the front page of the July 11 issue of Dawn 's Section 2, which is circulated only in the Punjab , sans Islamabad /Rawalpindi . On the top half of the page is a huge picture showing Farooq Leghari, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada , Nasrullah Khan, and Mir Afzal Khan "engrossed in discussing at the APC here on Saturday."
Nearly the entire right half is devoted to the APC and related political developments. On column two in the lower half of the page, there is a three-inch story headlined "29 pc pass metric exam." And the glad tiding it gives? "In all, 104,616 candidates appeared in the examination, of which 30,541 passed." Which means 74,075 of them failed outright or had their results withheld for one reason or another or would be required to take the supplementary examination.
The Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education , Lahore , conducted this examination in March. The Board took just about four months for compiling the results, which is some sort of a record for speed, stamina, and devotion to duty.
But what is this small matter of 74,075 students failing? Why should it bother Nawaz Sharif or Mohtarima Benazir Bhutto or Nasrullah Khan? B. B. went to Oxford and Harvard, and so will her children in due course. Nasrullah Khan does not need education to be in public life nor do thousands of others.
Education is for those who need jobs other than those purely political. For political power, you don't require any formal education. You need money and there is no money in education. The thing to do, you see, is to organise an APC and a long march. Your only mission in life, if you are a politician, is to serve the people; the toiling masses.
The only way to serve the poor, the toiling masses is to keep them poor and toiling. This stands to reason. The poor have little time to think, and the best way to prevent them from thinking is to keep them poor. And the best way to keep the people poor is to ensure there isn't any reasonable period of political stability; because during periods of political stability, people begin to make progress, they begin to get time to think for themselves, which is a very dangerous pastime, indeed.
So, what do we do when a government begins to get the hang of things? We (the politicians) shout it out of power, shoot it out of power, boot it out of power, APC it out of power, long-march it out of power, sack it out of power, intrigue it out of power but never vote it out of power; because that would put decision-making in the hands of the people, and the people must never be trusted with that.
No matter what the politicians do to cut each other's throats, it must always be in the name of the people, though. And let no APC ever discuss education or agriculture or industry or health or pollution or population growth or drug addiction or smuggling or our recurring trade deficits or similar other trivial issues on which this nation's survival depends.
And the floods? Why, that is not the politicians' bother. When did a Mian or a Wattoo or a Bhutto or a Nawabzada or a Mazari or a Leghari ever drown in the Indus or the Ravi or the Jhelum or the Chenab? We must not allow such frivolous matters to dampen our enthusiasm for the long march. What if a few hundred lose their lives or a few hundred thousand lose their all possessions when the rivers overflow their banks? They are used to it. They are actually happy in their misery. Otherwise, they would not be multiplying the way they are.
So, on with the long march! Islamabad , here we come! Shiver in your shalwar , Nawaz Sharif ! (Provided you are still there when these lines appear in print). The papers say 74,075 candidates have failed in the Lahore Board matriculation examination. So what? Let all of them fail next year. This is not an issue on which Nasrullah Khan should be wasting his precious time. He is a leader of national stature. We should not burden him with petty local issues like mass failures in the matriculation examination.
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A FRIEND of mine says he knows why President Ghulam Ishaq Khan sacked Mrs. Bhutto in 1990 and Mr. Nawaz Sharif in April this year.
Mr. Ishaq Khan, he says, has enjoyed real, ready-to-use authority all his life beginning from the days he was an Extra-assistant Commissioner or whatever to Chairman WAPDA , to Governor , State Bank, to Finance Minister, and to Secretary other offices in between. He was all the time ordering people about, sacking them, promoting them, and retiring them.
When he moved into the President 's House, he must have found it too large and lonely for him, there were not many people he could order about, and there was no one he could really sack except the Prime Minister .
One day, bored to distraction, he decided it was time he did something about it. So up he went and sacked Mrs. Bhutto , dissolved the National and Provincial Assemblies, and let it be known to all and sundry that he was still the boss he was in A.D. 1943. Everybody trembled and bowed before him and said, "Salaam O Mighty Sadr , thy will be done."
And the Sadr was pleased everyone knew he was the fountainhead of all authority. The days that followed brought great joy to the Sadr because he was once again in the limelight. A year went by and then another and Mrs. Bhutto 's successor, Mr. Nawaz Sharif , began to get his act together and the Sadr receded more and more into the background.
Sorrow descended on the Qasr-i-Sadarat once again and Mr. Ghulam Ishaq Khan became increasingly melancholic. He decided to do something about the matter. So one day, he dismissed the Prime Minister and dissolved the National Assembly and everything was back to its busting normal at the President 's House.
One day, one of his friends asked him why he had sacked Mr. Nawaz Sharif . "It is simple, you see, like his predecessor; he began to act as the Prime Minister . Like the lass from Larkana, this lad from Lahore never realised it was a P.A. I wanted, not a P.M.," he replied.
Sounds plausible, this yarn, doesn't it?
Friday, July 16, 1993
