The Thursday durbar is an overkill

Rulers that the gods want to fall on bad times are ditched to the advice of bureaucrats who being subordinates are creatures of obedience and incapable of breaking the tyranny of laws. An advice that frees you from the shackles of the system cannot come from its own factotums. The system is not a poem or a revelation or an extraordinary dream that shows the way. It is the next page on the file, what the baboos call the para ante. To suppose the solution of your predicament, of your crisis, can be found in the para ante is to suppose that eating more of the rotten kebabs that gave you the diarrhoea can stop your visits to the loo. Acting on some such advice of a senior para ante the President is holding Thursday durbars to replay recycled sermons that on other days of the week too have had no significant impact on the general listener. At this time particularly when it is time to act and not talk, it is falling on deaf ears. The rapt faces among his sanitised invitees that the camera picks to close up on do not make a very convincing statement.

A man’s attire is often a mirror of his mind. The PM has bought a new set of trendy neckties and in his three-piece perennials the FM looks cool like coriander leaves. If the President were to look at his durbar audience closely he would notice a motley crew dressed for a second go at matrimony rather than deliberations of national issues. In fact if he called up a gathering of widowers and willing divorcees for their vernal revival in some kind of a mass ceremony at state expense it would at least provide people with an alternative spectacle to the daily theatre of the absurd they are fated to watch on the national stage.

The President does seem to have a mind of his own but it looks like he is using more of the others’ these days. In big brotherly America the boss there retires to his presidential retreat with his dog to think up a way out of the crisis and no matter how often it is a harebrained plan that he devises while playing golf he at least can take the credit for original thought. And if and when he listens to bad advice, the adviser has had it. A short ceremony is held at the gates of the White House and the fellow is dispatched to oblivion. Here asses are collected and kept like stamps by school boys. And often like rustic bums we go to drooling morons for their intercession on our behalf when things take a bad turn. Mercifully the President, like his two exiled predecessors, has thus far not gone to any Baba Tunka for blessings. Baba Tunka was the popular Pir of the high and the mighty in the Nineties. Both Nawaz and Benazir sought his blessings: two strikes of his cane on the seeker’s bottom.

It is to be admitted the President is a good speaker. He enjoys talking and relishes lecturing to civilians. All men in uniform do. In Kohat where the Inter-Services Selection Board recruits the officer cadre much merit is placed on a candidate’s ability to talk, and to continue to talk even when the hat is empty. This is called quick thinking. There is no room there for slow thought, or quiet reflection. This is what my friend Akhter Ahsen told me when he was serving as psychologist with the ISSB. Talking to people who must listen to you is a great cathartic experience. It is said about Adolph Hitler he could experience a sexual release when his audience broke into wild applause. The power of speech is indeed great.

The hatchers of the Thursday durbar have not given thought to the mood of the brood outside. The invitees too are not a serious lot who come here to share their wisdom with the President. They are a disqualified bunch already because they are chosen by the spooks as safe people. They are regarded as safe because they have no spark and their own lives have been remarkably and demonstrably dull and uneventful. To expect this safe retinue of pliant souls to advise the durbar can only be an exercise in self deception. Every body knows the question-answer session is a scripted thing. Then thanks to his communication skills in the exercise of which he has not used much economy, the President’s position on all matters needs no further elaboration. His fight against terrorism, his campaign to subdue extremism, spread enlightened moderation, promote madressahs as the best NGOs, and explain to the world the meaning of Jihad, the economic turnaround his government has brought to a failed state, are all his prime time favourites on the listeners’ choice. And on most of these there is no great chasm that separates him from the flow of general opinion. The Thursday durbar is a little bit too much. It is what you call an overkill.