A Democracy Of Thieves

… and fraudsters, rapists and murderers. This is the truth about Pakistan’s democracy that Washington and London lobbied to impose on the country’s otherwise creative and hardworking people. The government in power, led by Mrs. Bhutto’s widower Asif Zardari, is made up of your choicest convicts whose names read like an entry book in a maximum security prison.

The opposition, led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, is even funnier. I’m not sure if we Pakistanis are supposed to laugh or cry. In the past six months, Mr. Sharif’s party has produced ministers and members of parliament with the following list of achievements:

attempted rape and murder
attempted smuggling of diamonds
attempted cheating in an academic examination
and a sexist slander against a lady member of parliament

And now we have a lady member of parliament from Mr. Sharif’s party appearing in a security camera showing impressive self confidence as she buys jewelry and clothes worth US $1,000 using a credit card she stole from another woman at a health club.

I believe that the accused lady politician, Shomaila Rana, can’t be blamed. Pakistan’s superrich feudal elite, which has a monopoly over politics and runs political parties as family businesses, has produced a ruling class that looks down at the country’s middle and lower class Pakistanis. Mr. Sharif, widely seen as Mr. Zardari’s future replacement, often gives the look of a vengeful man whose compass is stuck in 1999, the year he lost power to a military intervention.

So, next election we’ll be replacing government thieves with opposition thieves.

I leave you with these two fine short commentaries.

The first one is this hilarious commentary by Riaz Jafri, a retired colonel of the Pakistan Army who resides in Rawalpindi:

“One has to admire the nerves, the cool confidence and the calm composure of the lady MPA while presenting the allegedly ‘stolen’ credit card and affixing her signatures on the bill on making the purchases. Not an eye blinked nor a finger quivered during the entire episode, which would have made even a three-war hardened soldier like me sweat profusely. If the honourable MPA can be that deft, skilled and expert with a card not belonging to her, then what havoc could not be expected of her playing with the millions of the state funds and other lucrative deals entrusted to her by the nation? Hers is the 5th case bringing ignominy to the party. When an elderly white bearded Haji MPA can cheat in an examination, when an honourable minister can not only allegedly bypass the customs channels but also manhandle the custom staff on duty, when an honorable minister can misbehave with a lady MPA on the floor of the assembly and when an honorable minister is accused of raping a woman under threat of murdering her, can the image of the politicians and the political parties remain untarnished and clean? One would not be wrong in assuming that probably these are only a few out of the thousands of cases that have surfaced. A proverbial tip of the iceberg! How many more must have gone unnoticed and consequently unpunished. If such are our leaders, do we need foes?”

The second brief one is by Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote this insightful paragraph while reviewing a book on Pakistan:

“[T]he country remains in the grip of venal, feudal, wealthy politician-landlords like the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, for whom democracy means one vote one time, after which the victors go on to dominate indefinitely. Worse, greed and graft have led Islamabad’s ruling class to ignore large portions of the population, who remain illiterate, and their incompetent governance has opened the door to” chaos.