I remember once being lucky enough to squeeze into a talk, midway or thereabout, in Dubai by the late great Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, of The Independent. His description of the job of a correspondent, which you would stretch to mean journalist in your mind, provided one of the rare redeeming characteristics of the job.
It was a treat not just because I got to know why people paid good money (which I must admit that I didn’t) to hear what a correspondent on the front lines had to say about historical events as they unfolded, especially if he could often do it like sheer poetry, but also because his lecture was about why he believed correspondents must take sides when they report history-in-the-making.
It was fine to employ the US model of journalism, which gives 50-50 space to each side, when you report about a football match, according to the great man, but when you’re covering Israeli atrocities in Palestine, for example, you cannot in good conscience call a wall a fence, an occupation a dispute, and make terrorists out of people who fight for nothing more than the freedom to live in their own lands. Especially when your words write the “first draft of history.”
That made some of us feel better about amplifying Imran Khan’s one-seat party in the press. Not much later I interviewed him for Khaleej Times in a villa in an upscale Dubai neighbourhood. I asked him about rumours that Javed Hashmi, and a lot of people like him, might be welcomed into the party with red carpets and garlanded with flowers. “Never,” he shot back. “Nobody who’s benefited from the status quo for even 10 minutes will ever come into this party.”
He said he’d “rather struggle forever than open the door to electables.”
I thought of that moment when images of the “baaghi” appeared on TV a year or so later as he shoved PML-N workers by the throat when he left them and was indeed welcomed with garlands by PTI. “Main baaghi hoon; main baaghi hoon”, they chanted together. Shortly afterwards I mentioned to Ali Zaidi, who was always very helpful in connecting eager journalists with the party from the head office of his real estate company on Shaikh Zayed Road, that the influx of “electables” was upsetting the party rank and file, and they were saying so to reporters, but he just waived it aside as “the party is actually growing leaps and bounds.” His exact words.
I last interviewed Imran Khan, again for Khaleej Times, in Islamabad in 2018. By then he didn’t “believe” he’d said “such a thing about Javed Hashmi” and lamented to no end that Maulana Fazlur Rahman dragged religion into politics. He was also so sure by early summer that he would win the election in a couple of months, and the fact that we also said so, that he promised to give us the first official interview after it. His liaison with the foreign press at the time, Aneela Khwaja, bore witness.
That turned out to be just an insignificant one of the many, many promises that the skipper didn’t keep. All these years later, when his government has become a synonym for U-turn, he said things on his latest TV appearance (talk with the people) that betrayed a dangerous divorce from reality, especially for someone who’s running the whole country.
If, for instance, the government will not acknowledge that its economic policy has turned out to be completely broken, how will it adjust it? Why do you think it’s blamed just about everything from the previous administration to mafias to international commodity prices for inflation, even blatantly lied that prices in Pakistan were the lowest in the region, yet remained completely ineffective against it?
There was also unmistakable hubris on display — the pride and megalomania that precedes a person’s downfall that ancient historian Sophocles first warned us all about — and plenty of it as he trashed the opposition even though he’s been unable to pin a penny’s worth of corruption on them; something he’s had to axe his “accountability czar” for. And then TI’s (Transparency International’s) CPI (Corruption Perceptions Index) revelation of a 16-point or so decline in the country’s rating completely took the wind out of the ruling party’s anti-corruption mantra.
For those who could see all this from a mile away, nothing sums it up quite like another one of Fisk’s landmark phrases, “Horror it may be. Shock it is not,” even if he was describing Abu Bakar al Baghdadi’s takeover of Mosul in 2014. From now it’s just the Fawad Chaudharys, who’ve spoken for just about every party out there when they’ve been in power, and Shahbaz Gills, who’s only qualification for whatever job they have is that they’re sure to put on the ugliest show in the game, of the party kissing the ground Imran Khan walk on. That’s when you know for sure that the emperor has no clothes.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
Comments
Comments are closed.