ANYONE who wishes to understand the drama being enacted at the Supreme Court in Islamabad should watch the film Shatranj Ke Khilari, Satyajit Ray’s brilliant adaptation in 1977 of Munshi Premchand’s equally brilliant short story. Set in Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s effete court of Lucknow, it is centred around a game of chess, played obsessively by two noblemen — Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali. Fixated, these two remain oblivious to what is happening around them. They play to their destruction.

In the Pakistani plagiarised version, two leaders with more money than common sense are locked in a dispute from which neither can hope to emerge the victor. Determined not so much to win as to ensure that their opponent loses, they seem to be ready to risk all at the roll of a lawyer’s brief. In no country in the world could litigants expect an apex court to listen to one case continuously for so long, without the prospect of an end to a wind tunnel of arguments. This indulgent luxury is not available to the common litigant. There are thousands of cases yet to be adjudicated by just the principal seat of the Supreme Court in Islamabad.

Comparisons can be odious, and none could be more pointedly so than the parallel proceedings in the UK Supreme Court which recently concluded the case on Brexit. The full eight-member bench began its hearings on Dec 5, 2016. The lawyers were given four days in which to complete their arguments. The final judgement (no more than 101 paragraphs) on this complex constitutional issue was handed down on Jan 24, 2017, six weeks later. During that same period of time, the Panama-gate prosecutors have yet to establish a watertight nexus between the prime minister, his sons and their sister.

A game of political chess is being played.

No one can fault the burning sense of purpose that motivates the leader of the PTI to bring the prime minister to book for keeping incomplete records of his property transactions. Some might accuse him even of doing the right thing — for the wrong reason. If these two modern mirs are to play political chess, certain rules have to be followed. One of those must be that if an elected prime minister is to be removed from office, it should be by those who elected him to that office. Courts are there to apply the law, to adjudicate, not to destroy opponents. They cannot train legislators to observe the law.

Across the Atlantic, a US elected president is attracting similar anti-forces determined to oust him from office. Groups of disgruntled Americans are taking to the streets to disgorge their bile against Donald Trump. Their placards may carry whatever protests they can devise; they may shout whatever anti-Trump slogans they can invent, but President Trump intends to do exactly whatever he chooses to do. His first decisions — the abolition of the TPP treaty, the decision regarding anti-abortion legislation, his gauntlet to the press — are a clear indication that, like that other media-savvy president Ronald Reagan, he intends to behave as another Teflon-coated president.

Our prime minister seems to have gone one step further. Not only does he enjoy a Teflon-like imperviousness to gratuitous accusations and personal attacks, he has a velcro-like adhesiveness to his prime ministership. Perhaps, he believes that third time is lucky. More likely, he follows the old proverb that ‘many questions if left unanswered for a certain time will answer themselves’. He may genuinely believe that if he leaves questions unanswered, in time they will answer themselves. At a personal level, that may be a fine convenience. At a national level, it cannot substitute for official policy.

Spectators watching this game of mutually destructive chess being played in Islamabad can see beyond the players themselves, beyond the action in the foreground. They can see shadows of imperialism gradually taking over, just as once the East India Company did, when arm’s-length trading converted into economic subjugation and finally into an imperial supremacy.

Cynics would assert that — to take CPEC as one example — we the public are being straddled with a yoke of obligations the terms of which are being unconscionably withheld from us, that our freedom of choice is being handcuffed, and that we are being shackled into a cramped posture of subservience. It took us over 60 years to develop our stock exchanges. It has taken less than 40 days to surrender 40pc ownership of the Pakistan Stock Exchange to a foreign company.

Every political leader national and provincial would do well to memorise a closing dialogue between the two dispossessed mirs in Satyajit Ray’s film: “After nightfall, we will go back home. We both need darkness to hide our faces.” In which darkness do our leaders propose to hide their faces?

The writer is an art historian.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2017