Who Keeps the Deadly Duo in Business

About the same last year, mainstream news media and its many cousins were breathlessly covering the first-of-their-kind protests in Pakistan. Civil society had stood up against an evil dictator. Housewives, students, lawyers, and other such patriotic citizens had taken to the streets, bearing posters, slogans, loudspeakers, and a lot of hot air. “Go, Musharraf, go;� “Musharraf= Dog,� “Democracy is the best Policy…�oh, the sights and sounds of protests for a cause that’s lost its cause-ness.

One would think that all this is a theatrical piece whose main characters are a dictator who’s deposed a chief justice who’s realized nine years into the dictator’s reign that his claim to fame is illegal who’s backed by the power-hungry husband of a dead prime-minister who (for the time being) is also being backed by another ex-prime minister who tried to kill the dictator in an attempt to avoid the coup that gave the dictator life.

But it’s not. And we recommence the story with the power-hungry husband.

The question that Pakistan’s civil society must ask itself at this point is this: Where are the protests? Where are the housewives who were so anxious to get rid of Musharraf? And where are the students who organized meeting after meeting to bring back democracy?

One answer that comes to mind is that these people are unaware that the current government in Pakistan is the same, if not worse than the one they hated so vehemently. Asif Zardari is the new dictator and his head-honcho is Salman Taseer a.k.a the governor of Punjab Province. The recent dismissal of the elected Punjab government by a judiciary hand-picked by Zardari does not sound to me, or any other half-literate citizen, like a particularly democratic move.
Salman Taseer now rules supreme in Punjab, reporting, every so often, to Zardari who now rules supreme from his hideout in the President’s House. The dismissed Punjab government was headed by Shahbaz Sharif, the brother of ex-prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. As a chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz was famous for building roads, mending broken ones, cleaning up corruption in hospitals, and surprising lazy officials in crisis areas by a friendly weekend visit.

So where are the protestors now? An elected official of the largest and most significant province in the country has been barred from government. Democracy? Pas democracy is the correct answer.

They disappoint me and many others-- these now-silent protestors. I know where they are. They are at weddings, parties, book readings, art exhibitions, and other such irrelevant celebrations. While they are there, Salman Taseer, flanked by his slender wife walks in, shakes hands all-around, socializes, eats, drinks, acts just like one of them. No one questions why he is there. No one asks why he did what he did. No one protests. Another round of whiskeys and kisses in an air that’s pregnant with disaster. It is the upper-classes of Pakistan’s civil society that legalize corruption and inaction. It is permitted to one of them, but not to the dictator who came from the middle-class, the industrialist chief minister whose English was occasionally ungrammatical. Corruption is allowed when it speaks of trips to London and Paris, when it attends the most select parties and when its close friends are the masquerading literati.

No one sees the connection, I think, between a broken Punjab and a group of terrorists who managed to infiltrate the center of the city in such a way as to open fire on a visiting cricket team. No one notices that Zardari and Taseer expressed their condolences but continued with their other, more delightful preoccupations. No one acknowledged the bus driver who drove the wounded Sri Lankans to safety. No one will protest this one.