The Pashtun Problem

On August 18^th 2009 Asma Jahangir, then chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, met with the US mission in Pakistan to brief them about an HRCP report. The report alleged that Pakistani military had engaged in public, extrajudicial killings of suspected Taliban & Taliban sympathisers in the Malakand Division, even referencing mass graves.

Jahangir confided in the US mission however that the more inflammatory incidents of abuse had been ignored by the HRCP so as to avoid arming the Taliban’s propaganda machine. She then asserted that the HRCP would have tried to downplay the abuse allegations if the military had used the “usual tactic” of extrajudicial murders; staged encounter.

A staged encounter is when security forces kill a suspect in custody and then claim he died in an exchange of fire with them, an “encounter”. Such as the one Rao Anwar conducted to murder “Taliban” Naqeeb Mehsud.

This Faustian bargain is at the heart of the trouble brewingin Islamabad right now. To understand the Pashtun grievance, and the ongoing protest, one has to examine how the war against Taliban has unfolded in the last decade, and how it has been covered.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan systemically targeted and eliminated tribal leaders within FATA, establishing their control over the region but also robbing it of leadership and voices that could represent the people there. The Pashtun nationalist party ANP was next on their hit list. They lost many workers and leaders to targeted attacks, Bashir Bilour the most notable among them. Their coalition partners in the KP & Federal government at the time, PPP, of course lost Benazir Bhutto to a terrorist attack.

This meant that when the military operations took place, there was no Pashtun leadership from FATA to protest or identify any abuses and/or profiling that occurred. The Pashtun nationalist party, ANP, & the PPP for that matter, had themselves suffered at the hands of TTP and pushed for military action. Little interest was shown in keeping the military in check.

Rights watchdogs, activists & liberal sections of the press were already willing to back abuses against the population of FATA, which happened to be largely Pashtun, if it meant ridding the country of Taliban. The HRCP’s willingness to downplay extrajudicial murders is only one example of steps taken which, coupled with the appalling state of journalism in the country, presented a distorted image of the war to mainstream Pakistan. One which was completely void of any abuses that the, again largely Pashtun population, suffered at the hands of the state.

The easily identifiable bits are the support for drone strikes & military bombings inside FATA, and the framing of opposition to them as being pro-Taliban. Yet there are other ways of shaping discourse.

Treatment & plight of the Pashtun IDPs, which numbered in millions, never could wade into the national conversation. The missing persons issue has largely been linked with Baloch separatists and is reported in that context. The number of Baloch missing persons cases HRCP could confirm in 2012 is 198, whereas the number of missing person court cases in PHC alone, in the same year, were over 2000. It’s an epidemic for Pashtuns, and it is never in the news.

Then there’s the misreporting about casualties. Over and over completely fabricated figures for the number of people killed by TTP are published. Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies compile the actual numbers by tallying the count from each reported attack in their yearly security reports. As of 1^st January 2018, 22,048 people have lost their lives in violent terrorist attacks. This includes lives lost in sectarian & separatist (Baloch) violence, not just the TTP. Yet you hear 45 thousand, 55 thousand, 60 thousand. A fetish for increasing the death count plagues our media. This is to drum up support for the war, to do what is “necessary”.

What is necessary here is military bombings, profiling and extrajudicial killings of suspected Taliban. For which there are no figures. There is no telling how many have lost their lives in bombings or encounters/custodial killings. Even though we know all that has happened, some cases are detailed in Amnesty International report “Hands of Cruelty”.

This comes back again to the necessity of dealing with the Taliban, and the firm belief of our military, rights watchdogs and the press that any information that could hinder that goal should not be shared with the public. The problem with extrajudicial killings in this war however, as it is constructed now, is that the murder you condone is of a “suspected” Taliban, but a confirmed Pashtun.

A Naqeeb Mehsud.

Karachi is where the line has been crossed from “necessary” evil to clear ethnically, politically biased crime against Pashtuns. The demonisation of Pashtuns in the city was started by the terrorist Altaf Hussain and MQM, who had a political interest in doing so and a history of profiting from ethnic hate. Much like when Trump banned Syrian refugees by linking them with “Muslim” terrorists, Altaf Hussain railed against the “Talibanisation” of Karachi by FATA refugees for years.

The difference was that unlike in the case of Trump, the press here were in the corner of Altaf Hussain. Another difference was that Altaf himself is a terrorist and the MQM, not the TTP, and certainly not the Pashtun refugees, are the biggest threat to peace in Karachi.

According to the Police, by end of 2011 alone over 7,000 people had been killed in ethno-political violence in the city. “Ethno-political” is code for MQM & PPP, who the press aren’t at liberty to identify. By the end of the same year the number of people killed in “terrorist” - TTP, AQ, LeJ - attacks in the city was 720.

It is true that TTP militants did find their way into Karachi and established operations there, but the first target killing credited to TTP came in the August of 2012, an ANP leader Amir Sardar. The results of the Karachi operation launched in 2013 show that they remained small players in that respect.

According to a Rangers briefing about the operation in Aug of 2016, they were able to fix responsibility for 7,224 target killings in the city. Only 557 killings were traced back to members of banned organisations; TTP, LeJ, AQ.

5,863 killings were traced back to members of the MQM.

Yet it is young Pashtun men that are bearing the brunt of extrajudicial killings in the name of fighting terrorism. Extrajudicial murders in 2014 were 925, and in 2015 were 700 in Karachi. Naqeeb is just one of 450 killed, majority Pashtuns, by Rao Anwar alone. MQM members, according to party claims, that have been lost to extrajudicial killings stands at 62.

You have to be dishonest to not see the contrast here. One organisation has gotten away with murder, with collusion or condoning by rights groups & the press, because they claim to represent an ethnic group.

One ethnic group has suffered at the hands of the state, with collusion or condoning by rights groups & the press, for the crimes of an organisation that doesn’t represent them. It is not difficult to see why the media is as uninterested as it is in covering the Islamabad sit in.

Human Cockroaches

This is just unending, pathetic diversion from mass murder.

In the golden period between 2008-2013, every other month, often week, the killings in Karachi would “get out of hand”, as one gent put it. Rehman Malik would fly to the city and hold talks with MQM. Everyone was supposed to pretend that after he “redressed” MQM’s concerns, the lull in killings was because the killers had their favourite show on, went out to get sushi, or in one memorable instance, the wives and girlfriends that were doing the killing had seen the light.

In any case, MQM and their supporters in what goes for journalism in this country would throw in a “hum pay jinnahpur ka ilzam lagaya gaya tha”, or “people up north don’t understand Karachi” just to keep everyone quiet.

Then came Zulfiqar Mirza, he didn’t keep quiet. Again we would hear “pehle bhi jinnahpur” or “people outside Karachi don’t understand”.

Then came the SC judgement that MQM, ANP and PPP indeed were killing people. “Jinnahpur”. “Prejudice up north”

The last year or so the following has happened. MQM London members admitted to police there that they take money from Indian intel. Then the MQM golden boy Mayor told everyone who would listen the same.

Couple of days is it now since Altaf Hussain ordered an attack on the media after denouncing Pakistan? Yesterday Altaf and the MQM rabita committee expressed their firm resolve to undo the country and launch a rebellion with the help of Israel and India.

What is the response? A garbage anecdotal piece on people outside Karachi being prejudiced against it? The irony of ascribing negative stereotypes to a whole people, based on your personal experiences with a few, as a means to decry negative stereotyping is just completely lost on the largely Karachi based journalists lapping it up.

For almost a decade now debate on MQM’s mass killing gets shut down over and over through this excuse, that people outside Karachi don’t understand, that they are prejudiced, that they shouldn’t speak.  

Just one man who hasn’t stepped foot in Karachi since the turn of the century can speak about it, this one.

MQM MNA & owner of Bori-yani of the Seas learning new torture techniques & bheja cooking recipe from Altaf Hussain. pic.twitter.com/KIXnewuylj

— Altaf B. (@AltafBe) August 23, 2016

The description of that tweet isn’t off at all. Altaf Hussain literally tells his followers to hammer nails into their opponents, not to shoot them because it wouldn’t be painful enough, instead to smash open their skulls and feed the brains to dogs.

Hear that one more time. He wants opponents to not be shot because that wouldn’t be painful enough. Instead to hammer nails in them, smash open their skulls and feed the brain to dogs.

This is the man that should speak, not you. These nail hammering, skull cracking orders are the tactics Dawn and journalists in Karachi at most call “strong arm”. This is the freedom of speech Asma Jehangir is fighting a court battle to restore.

Not yours though. You don’t know how it is.

 The narratives are so completely false and wilfully dishonest it leaves you awestruck. They’re created just for a single purpose, divert from the mass murdering of MQM. Thousands of people have been killed and a madman is ready to plunge the city into more violence; “2 guys in my office said this to me”...  What!?

What? What is that? Why doesn’t that come up when they shoot an elderly woman in the face for protesting rigging? Or when people decry extortion? Or when ramzan turns into a bloodbath? Why do these narratives only spring up when MQM is in trouble? How did they even come into being?

Consider a current one, MQM is marginalized. If you ask how, you get a retelling of 47 to 85. Stopping at 85 because every dictator since has had their back. ISI helped them rig an election. Musharraf handed them the city, let them kill off every policeman they had complaints against and, I am fairly certain, assumed the small spoon position in bed.

So how is it marginalized now? How is it persecuted by the establishment of all fucking things? There are many persecuted people in Pakistan, denied their rights. The Baloch can argue a denial of education, of resources etc. The peasants in Okara are agitating for land rights. Religious minorities can claim neglect.

In 2013 when the current operation started, what were the rights MQM was fighting for? And against who?

It was the right to kidnap, the right to street crime, the right to “china cutting”, the right to extort, the right to kill people who refuse extortion, the right to kill members of other parties, the right to kill immigrants of unwanted ethnicities, the right to kill relatives of the people they had killed to dissuade from pursuing the matter, the right to kill witnesses if the matter did make it to court, the right to kill police investigating cases or giving protection to witnesses and the right to kill journalists for favourable coverage. Oh, also, after doing all this, the right to have a peaceful life with their families while drawing salary from government offices they had never been to.

These rights are not guaranteed in our constitution, in any constitution anywhere in the world. They are frankly a little unreasonable. And who were they fighting against for these rights? PPP and ANP and ST and so on and so forth. The hell was the issue with the state?

By 2012 the target killings in Karachi had claimed 8 thousand lives. The current figure is anywhere between 10 to 13K. This is the scale of the violence, just these last 8 years, not the 90s. To put that into perspective, consider that suicide bombings throughout Pakistan’s history have claimed 6.5K lives.

The state’s reaction to that violence, egged on and cheered by every journalists providing cover to mass murder in Karachi, has been sustained military operations. Aerial bombardments, artillery shelling, gunships letting loose in bazaars, the complete destruction of whole city centres, villages raised to the ground, millions of people made to leave their lives and homes behind to become refugees in their own country. How many of them lost their lives we will never know because journalists in Pakistan don’t believe in outdated concepts such as reporting.

In Karachi the state’s reaction is paramilitary raiding MQM headquarters to arrest convicted, convicted, target killers housed there.

How is that persecution!?

Nor does it stop there. The operation in Karachi has again been falsely built up by journalists sympathetic to MQM’s mass murder as just against the party. Nothing could be further from the truth. MQM is the most untouched out of all the violent actors in Karachi during this operation, despite being the largest armed group present there with the lengthiest history of murder.

The worst aspect of the Karachi op is the extrajudicial killings. Two months ago MQM claimed 56 of its members had been killed without trial since 2013. Yesterday in a talk show one MQM member claimed the number is now 62. MQM claim, not verified by any independent body.

62.

The number of people killed in extrajudicial killings in Karachi, according to HRCP, is 404. 404. This year. In 2015 it was 507 and in 2014 it was 925.

In all 3 years, 1836 people have fallen to extrajudicial killings by LEAs in Karachi.

Of them, by MQM’s own unverified claim as of yesterday, 62 belonged to MQM.

That is 200 less than the number of Police and Rangers, the “persecutors” that have been killed in just the first two years of the operation.

62 out of 1836.

That means 03.37 % of the extrajudicial killings in the city of Karachi in the last 3 years have been of MQM members.

How again is that being singled out for persecution? How is the operation being used just to target MQM?  Their supporters basically just make shit up out of thin air to keep the killing machine rolling.

The establishment doesn’t persecute MQM, that hasn’t been their history. That isn’t happening now. MQM falls foul of political governments and thrives under military rule. The most army is trying to do with the MQM is to wean it away from the drunkard in London because he’s become a liability.

The journalists and intelligentsia love MQM because its “values” align with their own; it fits the kind of country they want to see. Mass murder across 3 decades is small price to pay for politics of your liking.

What of the other 1836 killed in the operation? What of the thousands and thousands that have lost their lives since 2007 in Karachi? Nothing. You never hear a “you don’t understand Karachi” piece for them. That is only reserved for MQM. The pain of journalists and newspapers is only reserved for MQM.

The poor people in Karachi that die at the hands of MQM or at the hands of the state should now accept the fact that they are just little cockroaches in the grand scheme of things. That’s how they are toyed with, cut up and thrown away; like insects. For no good reason at all. Except that it was their misfortune to not be born in liberal, progressive MQM households. So now their fate is to die.

They have to die so the military can keep its pet hounds another decade, they have to die so MQM members get over their sense of marginalization, they have to die so Asma Jehangir can restore freedom of speech, and they have to die so DAWN can see the progressive politics it has overlooked 3 decades of mass murder for.

That’s what cockroaches are for, dying.

And if you aren’t okay with that, or with MQM getting away with mass murder over and over again, then you are just a prejudiced outsider.

P.S:

The combined journo-military project to present an institutional killing machine as having a “non-criminal, non-militant” wing has gone off to a fabulous start. Since Ajmal Pahari wasn’t available, they have got the next best thing to be mayor of Karachi.

Waseem Akhtar once called a judge into his office and had him quash criminal cases against 5000, that is five thousand, MQM criminals in one go. Normally in Sohail Warriach’s “Aik Din Geo Ke Saath” the guests speak about the food they like, or what they do in their leisure time. Waseem Akhtar’s question was about which weapons has he used. Alhumdulillah, he replied in the positive to everything from a T.T. pistol to an AK47.

Now the Home Minister of 12^th May and the man who armed MQM to the teeth in Mush era, you’re all welcome, will head the rebranded “political/Pakistan” wing of the party.

Expect more cockroaches to die.

Supporting mass murder

Mumtaz Qadri’s execution on 29^th February was a net positive. For once the judicial system delivered and he was held accountable for his crime. It shows that despite support for a murderer, he is, and should be treated as, a murderer.

What has happened since isn’t all that though. That a large number of people treated Qadri as a hero and launched protests was expected. As was the turnout for his funeral. So the shock over that was a little bemusing; his execution was a big deal precisely because he had this support.

Yet more than the shock over the numbers that turned out, the surprise over the idea of it was, more bemusing? There was indignant outrage over the fact that people - mullahs, uneducated idiots, religious nutters, seminary students, etc. - openly support a murderer. Yeah. That people can support murderers caused considerable doom and gloom, not to mention anger. Pakistanis have a special talent for overlooking irony, especially journalists.

Mustafa Kamal’s tell some press conference a couple of days ago explained why that was nauseatingly hypocritical. Sub nauseatingly hypocritical for more bemusing. Since when is support of murderers an alien concept, especially for journalists?

Whenever the truth is spoken about the MQM, many pillars of clarity in the media react like they were Mufti Naeem and somebody had said we have a rape problem. Straight to the foreign agenda, in this case the “script”, coupled with ad hominem quips and a vague, deliberately false reference to lack of proof when knowing that most cases go unreported, with an even more abysmal conviction rate.

Yet Mufti Naeem isn’t as suave and I am pretty sure that his explanations wouldn’t tally as closely with a rapists’, as these journalists’ do with the mass murderers. It’s like the editorials and MQM press releases are written on the same desk.

A more important distinction is that while a Mufti Naeem does his best to convince you that rapes aren’t an issue – DAWN’s editorial on the subject makes no mention of the fact the MQM commits mass murder, does not mention killings at all actually, not even in passing – he wouldn't go on TV to bat for a particular rapist.

Again. A very important distinction. Not just apologia, not just obfuscation, not just misdirection; support for the perpetrator.

Have you seen a Mullah come on TV and tell you that rapists actually have a nice personality? Or write in an Op-Ed that rapists have some progressive values? Vote for the rapists to strengthen democracy? Rapists are the bulwarks against terrorism?

Yet that is the prescription from the, I think “rational” is the self-anointed badge now, section of the media. The mass murdering terrorist organization in Karachi is openly supported, championed by people in the media (Dishonourable mention: Nadeem F Paracha). We are told it is the bulwark against terrorism, of all things, liberal hope and shits rainbows.

Even by 2012, target killings in Karachi had killed roughly the same number of people as all of the suicide bombings & drone attacks combined, combined, in Pakistan’s history. Target killers, convicted target killers, have been arrested literally from MQM’s headquarters. Many of the same people that support the mass murdering MQM often take to writing dramatic, emotional details of the atrocities they want to highlight in order to spur a reaction. Although that largely works, they are among the target audience here and since they don’t actually give a shit about human life, going into the details would largely be redundant.

Which brings us to the propaganda job journalists do for this mass murdering entity. No matter what happens, they keep telling people that actually nothing has happened. If an MQM member confesses to security agencies, they will tell you it was under duress. If he confesses to the media, it’s the script. If he confesses to the Scotland Yard.. screenplay perhaps? Supreme Court ruling; well there’s a lot of extremism in the country. Convicted and convicts captured from the bloody headquarters of the party; Musharraf was a supporter of RAW then?

There’s denial because it’s deliberate. There’s side tracking because it is intentional. There’s no intellectual honesty here because people who wilfully support mass murder aren’t looking for an honest dialogue.

This is an invaluable service these journalists provide to MQM. Misdirection, diversion, intellectual dishonesty and plain lying help maintain legitimacy for MQM. A terrorist organization that shoots elderly women in the face, cuts people up from limb to limb or burns them alive for extortion is continually presented as a viable political entity. It has a mandate, and so many admirable qualities that it should be accommodated in the political system.

You could say but it already has support of the people, well as did Mumtaz Qadri. As did Malik Ishaque, who wasn’t even convicted despite killing a lesser number of witnesses. Should they be viable stakeholders? Do votes give a right to murder? Do elections results bring back the dead? Would it be okay for DAWN to say the Nazis had a “well-earned reputation for strong-arm tactics” but they did improve the economy and were “popular” so… you know..

Guess who would encourage a soft corner for the Nazis as the bulwark against…. say communism?

Hint: Rhymes with foebbels.

People vote for MQM because of ethnic identity, ideological leanings, death threats, illegal patronage or self-interest and make their peace with its mass murder. They are supporting mass murderers because there’s a contract where they get something in return. That does not however mean that it is not a mass murdering terrorist organization. It is. The same way the Nazis were. Malik Ishaque. Mumtaz Qadri.  

The good thing again is that Mumtaz Qadri paid for his crime, and people who support him were called out for it. Supporters of a murderer; how disgusting. Revolting. Sickening. Repugnant. You get the idea.

It would be nice if these MQM supporting journalists & media people, who ironically take pride in facing “fascist” trolls on social media, were confronted for being supporters of a mass murderer who is the closest thing to Adolf Hitler in this part of the world. 

Working Paper On Political Implications Of Disease In Journalism

A strange cosmic event occurred yesterday. I saw a number of people criticising MQM for putting someone’s life in danger. The someone being Khursheed Shah of the PPP, the number of people being the many past & present PPP loyalists in the media. 

This shouldn’t be a surprise then should it? If PPP were threatened, PPP would come to the rescue. Not exactly. Over the last 6 or so years, the MQM have not only threatened, they have killed plenty of PPP people. It hasn’t really bothered the gents in question. Of course the lives of low level party workers or caught in cross fire innocents are less dear to intellectuals than the lives of venerated meter readers/leaders, but that’s not the complete story.

A closer look at the situation reveals that the enlightened people are angry not because of the destination, but because of the route MQM have chosen to get there. Blasphemy allegation. Thou shall not mix religion with politics, lest bad things happen. 

Or a wonderful thing. For the last 6 years, the same people have been so quiet about the MQM that you would think they were too busy shitting their pants, or that their drugs were being held hostage, or that they were just plain incapable of sight or comprehension when it came to the party. Because the party that has somewhere between 10-to-35 thousand armed combatants at its command, which it uses to kill political opponents, to kidnap and to extort, (when they are not secularizing the environment) never had to hear any complains about its conduct from our friends.

Yet they have now found their voice. As soon as MQM played the blasphemy card, it became evident that the avowedly liberal are capable of not only witnessing MQM’s activities, but also adept at speaking up to the Namaloom among us. 

Which is why we must perhaps rethink the label of PPP loyalists, for these are men, and women, persons, loyal not to any political party, but only to ideology. So much so, that they do not see anything outside of an ideological context. 

For example. Killing people in the name of religion.  *Blood boiling*. 

See, religion is a no go, religion based politics, religious violence. So killing people in the name of religion is wrong. Their definition of any title they grant each other is simply “one who opposes any ills that befall us because of religion & religion alone”. Hence the blasphemy outrage. 

Once you take the religion part out of it, they become placated.

For example. Killing people.  *crickets chirping*

Nothing. This is why as MQM, PPP & ANP have murdered thousands upon thousands in Karachi, to go along with extortion and other minor offences, our friends with ideological clarity have remained at peace with these parties. The reasons for killing and extortion by these parties are strictly secular, so it’s ok. 

Consider that in the many, many, many decades between 2007 and 2011 around 7,000 people were shot dead in Karachi. Also consider that in the short while between 1947 and 2014, around 6,123 people have been killed in the whole of Pakistan via suicide bombings. Now contrast the outrage.

Again, here’s why; they simply do not see a murder if it is not a murder in the name of religion. In fact the concept of crime as a whole is lost to these folk. Whether it be money laundering, stealing, kidnapping, extortion, land grabbing & of course killing, it simply does not register as a crime unless it is done in the name of religion or done by religious outfits (because they do it in the name of religion, duuhhh).

People who suffer from this condition are called Non-Facetious Peeplyas or NFPs for short. The condition is called NFPtitis. And its discovery helps explain many aspects of the, much talked about yet hitherto unexplained, political deadlock at the journo-worker level.

See, NFPtitis has political choice implications and it renders the moral, legal and magnetic compass of a patient obsolete. This in turn leads to a lot of confusion & anger when NFPs are dealing with political opponents. A great example to consider would be their interaction with PTI folk.

The new party on the block is largely fuelled by affluent upper middle class types from urban areas. These are largely non-ideological individuals who stayed away from politics until half a decade ago. Their view of crime is not shaped by an ideological leaning.

That is to say; they consider killing people a crime, and this is important, even if it is not done in the name of religion. This holds true also for stealing, kidnapping, extortion & other offences. Also worth noting is that they harbour  disdain for the excesses committed by political elite & can’t shake of a sense of injustice borne from the old guard parties, metaphorically speaking,  literally getting away with murder.

So when they interact with an NFP who’s propagating the case for, say, PPP or MQM they would have a certain aloofness or aggression. The aloofness because they have not, & the aggression because the PPP has, been involved in killings, corruption & other such stuff.

On their part, an NFP believes that PPP has done no killing & corruption because, as explained earlier, the NFP is programmed to register a crime only when it’s done in the name of religion. NFPs are thus, in their mind, presenting the case not of criminals, but normal politicians. The NFPs also tend to believe that middle class focused politics is not the best way to go. They constantly hallucinate about a young feudal billionaire prince as the messiah who can shout the lower classes into prosperity.

Encounters between the two thus leave the PTI folk amazed that there are people asinine enough to defend such criminals. While the NFPs are left wondering how people can be so self-righteous & vicious, not to mention who mock Marx’s vision of dynastic rule by billionaire capitalists to empower the lower classes. Crazy talk comrade.

This is a genuine problem which has gone unaddressed for too long. The PTI folk, unable to comprehend how seemingly educated people in media can openly support criminals & murderers, conclude that NFPs are on the party payroll. The NFPs, impervious to crime committed by a PPP type party because of NFPtitis, are unable to comprehend how seemingly educated people on social media can be so hateful. They conclude that the PTI folk are intolerant trolls. Fascist, say those in terminal stages of NFPtitis.

All the hate because they don't understand each other, and that because of one silly disease. Sigh. 

This chasm greatly pains me, and needs urgent redress. So people can live in peace & harmony. And Karachi. However, great challenges mar this endeavour. On the one hand, cleansing lifelong ideology from the NFPs is too much to ask for. On the other hand, indoctrination of all middle class urbanites is too tedious a task. 

What to do? Have no fear, for my suggestion to resolve the issue at hand is both, like me, brilliant and simple. Legalize marijuana. 

I mean crime. Legalize crime. It solves everything.

The NFPs’ worldview comes in line with the rest of the country, AND the urban middle classes lose their sense of injustice & hate towards parties that NFPs love. We can thus live in an ideological utopia where nonsense concepts like crime & law won’t hamper us from siding with the thief of our choice. And you know there won’t be murder in such a society, because we won’t admit that anyone was murdered. Like Murtaza. 

You’re all welcome.

On Rigging

First, a few observations on the new narrative being constructed about rigging; specifically the ‘electiontribunals’ argument made famous by who appears to be Fakhruddin Ibrahim’s son. While many went gaga over it yesterday, this 'view' has been here for a month now. I first read it in a Dawn column at the start of last month, and in a Five Rupees blog the next day. Since then it has been furiously parroted by at least one PMLN guy on TV; the new Punjab law minister. 

The argument basically is that the election tribunals are working fine, with 78% (latest FAFEN report) of the petitions disposed of already. ‘Already’ and ‘fine’ here are obviously relative to which side of the political divide you are.

The tribunals are supposed to conduct hearings day-to-day and under no circumstances grant an adjournment of more than 7 days. They broke the law and granted adjournments of more than 7 days on 2,393 occassions. And 'already' it is almost a year after the stipulated time period for settling the petitions, with the new assemblies having served 25% of their term, and the process isn’t done. Next will come appeals in the Supreme Court.

More importantly, the disposal of these petitions doesn’t have as much bearing on settling the rigging issue as you would think. That has to do more with the manner of their disposal.

Consider that 26 petitions never made it to tribunals, 28 were withdrawn and 22 dismissed due to non-prosecution. By far the largest number, 126, were dismissed on technical grounds, these include some of MQM’s wonders in Karachi, and 30 were dismissed due to ‘unknown reasons’ (FAFEN tried and failed to obtain copy of orders).

Petitions which went to full trial and couldn’t be proved stand at 62. Petitions accepted stands at 24, with the most number of de-seated MPs belonging to the PMLN at 10.

62-to-24 is a pretty serious ratio. Make that 62-to-25 after another MP, again from the PMLN, was de-seated on allegations of rigging in PP-97 Gujranwala.

Additionally, even the petitions that went to full trial and couldn’t be proved include many where influential government figures held sway and recounts or vote verifications were never carried out.

Which brings us to NA 110. Khuwaja Asif’s victory here was challenged by the PTI as one of four constituencies where they demanded recount and vote verification. Video evidenceof PMLN polling agents stuffing ballots was also available.

Vote verification was never carried out. Instead, as Mr Ibrahim pointed, the tribunal found that the petitioner was non-serious. This example was also quoted in the initial five rupees blog, which sourced the two pages of the verdict from a defence.pk forum. Also available on the forum was the version of the petitioner, which has been ignored by both the initial blog and the recent article.

The petitioner claimed that he had in fact attended all hearings but the court did not grant the request for vote verification. Later when he travelled abroad with the consent of the tribunal, a hearing was set in his absence and he was declared absent and disinterested in said hearing.

So while vote verification, or even a recount, never took place, the official record for this petition will read “not proved in trial”.

The order in NA 110 by election tribunal apparently annoyed with adjournments from petitioner is dated May 12. On May 16, Speaker of the national assembly Ayaz Sadiq got his stay order extended against recount in NA 122. He clearly hasn’t annoyed any judge. NA 122 is the second NA constituency where the initial demand for recounting and verification was made.

A glimpse into this constituency is provided by vote verification in six polling stations of its provincial counterpart, PP 147. The record for the 6 polling stations showed that around 4,700 votes were polled here. However, only over 3,700 could be recovered from the bags. Around 700 of them were cast using fake CNIC numbers on the counterfoils.

The third NA is 125 with Khwaja Saad Rafique. The petition filed against him states that at the very least 15 polling stations in the constituency that polled at 100 percent should be opened up for verification. 15 different polling stations had a voter turnout of 100 percent. No verification has been ordered.

Voters in the area filmed and photographed Khuwaja Saad barging into one women’s polling station after the other, an upright police SP in tow. The current minister later claimed that he went to the polling stations because all of them, and these are his words, “were taken over by PTI women”.

In the storied history of Pakistani elections, this is the first instance an MNA and a police SP had to rush to different polling stations in order to liberate them from women.

There is another instance of a polling incident involving women & PMLN. In the by-elections after the 2008 election, PMLN workers and police barged into a women’s polling station. They grabbed the ballots from PML-Q women supporters. Before running away with the ballots, they beat the women, molested and “de-shalwared” them, as witnessed and reported here by Marvi Memon, current PMLN MNA.

The last NA constituency is NA 154. It saw Siddique Khan Baloch gain 40,000 or so votes overnight to beat Jehangir Tareen by around 10,000 votes, with rejected votes over 9,000. 2 days later his historic turnaround victory made sense when it was announced he would be joining the PMLN.

After a year of stays when recounting commenced the ballots were found infested with termites. Polling bags are supposed to be sealed after counting so no votes can be added or taken out. 80% were unsealed.

Overall, the three most common complaints in the election process have been:-

1)     ROs, who were judges, helping one party or another & fudging the vote counts provided by Presiding Officers, a la “typo”.

2)      Collusion of POs & polling staff with one party or another to stuff ballots, slow down women’s voting etc.

3)      Refusal to sign and hand over Form XIVs, polling details and vote count, by POs to polling agents. This can later to be used to tally with ROs counts. But only if you get it, get it?

In fact, according to FAFEN, 212 of the petitions that made it election tribunals levelled allegations of corrupt or illegal practices by the administration, election officials and/or polling staff.

This has different connotations for different areas. In Balochistan of course the military didn’t want Akhtar Mengal to win and large scale voter suppression, PMLN’s Abdul Qadir Baloch won by polling a whopping 7,000 votes, helped achieve that end. In Karachi the votes were going to the MQM or the polling staff were going to boris. Etc.

So who did it in Punjab, & how? Nobody talks about this for obvious reasons, but I am sure everyone in the know, knows. In the first week after the election bureaucrats in Lahore were telling anyone who would listen that Aslam Kamboh & Justice Ramday were the king’s men who did what was necessary.

The Election Commission admitted, and FAFEN pointed out, that they did not have complete authority over the ROs. The ROs are answerable to the courts and the POs to their relevant government departments, which for a large part happen to be the education department.

In subsequent reports FAFEN has recommended that the ECP should be empowered to suspend and take action against these public functionaries.

However, the damage in this election has been done. Perhaps stung after finding ‘radi’ filled in polling bags of Kasur, Aitezaz Ahsan is the first and only person I can think of who spoke about Justice Ramday & Justice Khwaja Sharif coordinating the activities of ROs on May 11, to the benefit of the winners in Punjab.

Some police officers were transferred from Punjab to Balochistan before Najam Sethi took office as caretaker CM, not when he was there. While Muneeb & Khwaja Saad will have you believe he shuffled around the Punjab government as much as humanly possible, he did forget to remove one guy.

Aslam Kamboh, who had been serving as Shahbaz Sharif’s secretary for schools since 2009, was accidentally & totally unintentionally allowed to remain in that position by future chairman PCB Najam Sethi during elections. No wonder POs, Gov school teachers, were so reluctant to sign Form XIVs. 

Nobody has publically taken his name so far, but the PTI have hinted at it lately, so he might come up before 14^th August.

Will it make a difference? Not likely. In a country where the caretaker CM of a province said on air that rigging took place & he wasn’t “allowed” to go outside on election day, in the same show where the anchor had ballots in his hand, people are still looking for evidence of rigging.

Evidence that can satisfy these people, and the Pakistani courts, is hard to come by. It is even harder to come by against the Sharif family. Affidavits against them by colluders in riggings past are not it, nor are admissions of money laundering, videos of their goons beating people or even audio tapes of Shahbaz Sharif influencing a judge.

There’s never any ‘evidence’ against the Sharifs.

While it's hard to match the resolve shown in not finding evidence against the Sharifs, people on the other side now have somewhat comparable views on rigging. With the ECP & judiciary already viewed as controversial, to say the least, vote verification by NADRA seemed the only alternative that could satisfy them. The whole episode with NADRA chief Tariq Malik, from his illegal removal by Nawaz Sharif to the current arrest plans, has put an end to that option. And while the court noted that Tariq Malik was threatened & put under pressure to resign, evidence against the Sharifs again eluded them.

Well, buckle up then.

Corrupt Over The Murderous

“I will take the ‘corrupt’ over the ‘murderous’ every day, all year.”

That’s the line that pushed a certain segment of our educated (in the basic formal sense) populace to orgasm Sunday morning. Saroop Ijaz giving words to their frustration built up, especially during the last month or so, but generally, over years. Oh how they have waited for this, and how indeed have I.

First though, Imran Khan. The man is a liar, also condescending, ignorant and sinister. It’s hypocritical, deceitful and stuff of him to even pretend to honour our martyred soldiers. It’s silly that he would know better than Saroop just because he has been to the tribal areas. Saroop knows all. Hail.

The counterweight is of course the ANP. ANP good, know tribal land better, Imran bad, idiot.

Thus the future government will, in Saroop’s view, yearn for a “reconciliatory embrace with the terrorists over dead bodies”. This will be different from when ANP-PPP thrashed out a peace agreement with the same foes, or as they pledge to do again in the future, because they went, and will in the future go, ‘around’ the dead bodies.

Going ‘over’ dead bodies is what’s really bad. Everyone knows that, stupid.

Now let’s come back to the real issue here.

The murderous, vs. the corrupt. The animalistic vs. the humane. The people who believe
in dialogue, just as you do, vs. the people who take out a gun, shoot someone repeatedly, cut them into pieces and dump them in a gunny bag.

Which ones are the murderous again?

Yes, the guys who aren’t being killed, and/or a perceived to be quiet, are murderers. The guys actually, physically, killing people aren’t.

It’s confusing, yes. Little bit. But there is a reason why such marvellous logic has graced a newspaper near you.

Let me explain with the help of two pictures.





See. One of these guys is a terrorist responsible for the killing of a former Governor. The other pumped 27 bullets into the back of Salman Taseer.

That though isn’t how the ‘Saroopish’ folks see it. They are seeing one very charismatic leader of a liberal-secular last hope for sanity party and a guy who pumped 27 bullets into the back of Salman Taseer.

Notice how “terrorist responsible for the killing of a former governor” translates into “very charismatic leader of a liberal-secular last hope for sanity party”.

Now you cannot be blamed for wondering if these guys have horse-shit injected directly into their brain, because, well, they do. The consequence of injecting horse-shit directly into your brain is a mental disorder called Secularitis.

Secularitis is a serious condition not to be taken lightly and it has fascinating effects on one’s vision, among other things. Like, for example, the basic understanding of phenomenon such as terrorism.

A quick Google search could tell you that terrorism is defined as “The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.”



That though isn’t how a patient of secularitis sees it.



For them, it shows "The use of violence and intimidation by bearded man. (Except Zulfiqar Mirza.)"

Although this explains why patients such as Saroop cannot define what the MQM-PPP-ANP do as terrorism, it still does not explain how they don’t even perceive it as murder.

That is a most interesting matter and one that has confused doctors for a long time. The most credible theory was that Secularitis patients see the people killed by their beloved parties as dogs. This theory though has been rejected on the basis that, since many patients are dog lovers and pretty concerned about animal rights in general, they would have reacted at the killing of around 9000 dogs.

Thus it is still unclear how Secularitis patients view people murdered by ANP-PPP-MQM. All that we do know is that they are not viewed as humans. Or dogs.

Even our limited knowledge of the disease though explains many phenomenons that would otherwise seem absurd.

For example, that the sudden talk of “funerals in other Pakistan” has burst out after around 55 deaths in a month while it didn’t happen after 100 deaths in 4 days can only be explained with reference to Secularitis.

Similarly, the belief that we are anti-militancy with Zulfi Mirza’s wife as the Speaker of National assembly can again only be attributed to Secularitis. The same goes for condemnation of terrorism with a career target killer as governor.

The examples, as you can imagine, are many and implications are wide. The most peculiar among them though has to be:

“I will take the ‘corrupt’ over the ‘murderous’ every day, all year.”

When the slimy fuck will actually take the murderous corrupt every day, all year.