City Notes

The unseating from the National Assembly of Railways Minister Kh Saad Rafiq is being treated by Imran Khan as proof that he should be Prime Minister. The Judicial Commission is supposed to tell Mian Nawaz Sharif he should just roll over and play dead. It should understand that its purpose is not to find out who was behind the 2013 election result, but to arrange for Imran’s coronation. If Kh Saad must be sacrificed, then so be it. And Speaker Ayaz Sadiq is line to be next, now that NADRA has said it can’t verify his votes.
Kh Saad is a streetfighter brought up in the Old City of Lahore. He will not go down without a fight. Of course, the PTI would like to see Hamid Khan take the seat. It’s a lawyer’s seat. It was held by Ch Aitzaz Ahsan for the PPP. Apart from being Interior Minister in the 1988-90 PPP government, he is also a very prominent lawyer. Hamid Khan is also a leading lawyer. Kh Saad is very much a politician, having started in student politics a long time ago. His father was assassinated in 1975, and his mother was an MPA in 1985. Interestingly, she was one of the leaders of the rebellion against Mian Nawaz, then Punjab CM. Such are the twists and turns of politics, that her son is in a Nawaz federal Cabinet. No, he will not go quietly into the night. The PTI might do worse than concentrate on the Commission proceedings.
The PTI might also do well to put other things in its house in order, like the internal party elections controversy. It’s interesting that other parties have foundered over internal elections. Remember the Tehrik Istiqlal? There were a number of issues for that party, and one of them was the holding of intraparty elections. It seems that the Tehrik Insaf might be going down the same road. At the moment, all it has going for it is that Imran won the World Cup when he was younger than Misbahul Haq, who has just beaten Bangladesh. No mean feat, by the way, not the way other captains went down in the ODIs and T20.
Still, while Saad Rafiq appealed, his Punjab party chief inaugurated a solar park in Cholistan. Solar power is the coming thing, and when it becomes economical to power electric cars with electricity, and to produce that electricity by solar panels on its roof, who will need cars that run on petrol? There is a lot of thermal generation, like the Nandipur plant, but the future is with renewable sources. No one is saying that the Kalabagh Dam is outdated, but it’s certainly looking old-fashioned. Who knew that desert could be so useful? And when will they learn to generate electricity from hot air? Our assemblies will find themselves in session all year round, and members will have to have electrical engineering degrees.
When that happens, I wonder there will be the same attention paid to blacks being killed by white cops in the USA. The latest example, after Ferguson, Missouri, has come in Baltimore, where there was some rioting. You have to grant Americans that they know how to riot without burning tyres. We, on the other hand, don’t know how to. However, without going into the rights or wrongs of the blacks rioting in Baltimore, the media portrayal contrasted with the US media’s comparative silence over that of Palestine. What did the rioters do that was in any way worse than what was happening in Palestine?
Over here, there is no concern over either, but over Dr Zulfiqar Mirza, the former Sindh Home Minister, who is now in the odd position of being called a Jagga by his old boss, Sindh CM Qaim Ali Shah. Dr Mirza is well connected, for not only is his wife former National Assembly Speaker Fehmida Mirza but her nephew Manzoor Wassan was his successor as Home Minister. His old Cadet College Petaro classmate is ex-President Asif Ali Zardari. So they’ve been friends for about half a century. And that friendship which has now degenerated to the point where Dr Mirza couldn’t visit a police station in Badin and stop an FIR being registered against a supporter without ending up on bail from an anti-terrorist court.
That does not promote the image of Pakistan as a non-violent place, an image that took a beating in Garland, Texas, where a convention was held of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), as one of the two attackers killed, turned out to have a Pakistani connection, being the son of a Pakistani father and American mother. That militancy showed that it isn’t just blacks who feel disaffected in US society. Yet the attraction of Western society can’t be denied. That attraction is behind the 400 refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean trying to get to Europe. It seems that there’s so many drownings that there seem more refugees at the bottom of the Med than in Europe, which is squawking about them.
That squawking did not include the UK electing one MP in the UK Independence Party, though the win by the Tories looks that way. The Labour Party was wiped out. But the pollsters, who had predicted a close election, had the most egg on their faces…
Another set of people with egg on their faces was, well, nobody. There was a helicopter crash which left three ambassadors and two ambassadors’ wives indubitably dead. Yet it was not the fault of the Foreign Office, which had arranged the tour, nor of the Army, which had provided the helicopter. The Army cannot be criticised because of Zarb-i-Azb, while the Foreign Office won’t take any criticism if the Army won’t. Well, that crash can’t help our image abroad, assuming that an ex-home minister on bail and a militant have left any.