City Notes

There’s bound to be some complaining when the President’s son escapes unhurt, but 29 ordinary citizens get killed in Mastung, when they are pulled off a bus bound to Karachi from Quetta, but the President and his wife would be relieved that their son made it. Presidents and Prime Ministers individually bear their burdens, not their children. I’m glad that the President’s son escaped, unlike poor Ali Haider Gilani, who was kidnapped just before the last election, but who only now spoke to his father, Yousaf Reza Gilani, the ex-PM. And it should be pointed out to the heirs of those killed in Mastung that if Mamnoon’s son had been killed or kidnapped, their loved ones would still not be alive.
There is a miasma of violence around. The police, exonerated in Model Town, was firing on lawyers in Daska, and killing them. Rehman Malik belongs there, and not only was he not on the spot, but he has been nowhere to be seen. No wonder he is so unelectable there, he has to enter Parliament through the Senate. Still, even though Rehman Malik wasn’t around, one SHO in Daska proved that police encounters don’t occur because of natural viciousness, but appalling stupidity.
Appalling stupidity is what seems to have the football world in turmoil, what with a passel of Sepp Blatter’s minions being arrested for corruption. Luckily, no Pakistani was arrested, or it would have caused screams of political victimization. Well, Sepp still won a fifth term. He’s been there since 1998, and he could be around for some time. His predecessor, Joao Havelange, was there for 24 years, and Jules Rimet held the office for 33 years, from 1921 to 1954. So good old Sepp is barely getting started.
But it seems that not only was the 2018 World Cup awarded to Russia fixed, so was the 2022 Cup to Qatar. So what’s new? D’you think the World Cups awarded in cricket have been perfectly aboveboard and gentlemanly? And do keep in mind that football is supposed to be a yobs’ game. I mean, the only game where fan clubs are involved in the politics of violent resistance. No cricket supporters involved in Tehrir Square, were they? And don’t forget the role of football in the lives of British skinheads. And if TV advertisers call the shots in cricket, won’t they in football?
In the meanwhile, I couldn’t decide who had a harder job in sport, Sepp the Cup Sellers’ Friend or the Zimbabwean cricket team. Not only are they being left severely alone by militants, but the likes of Azhar Ali are scoring centuries off them. Next thing you know, they’ll be asking Sepp to send a team to Pakistan. However, Pakistan has as much chance as a snowball has of lasting in Hell of winning a football World Cup. It has a chance of winning in cricket. It has never won since 1992. Mind you, but it has a chance. It has always had one. Which it has always thrown away.
Anyway, it seems that the Daska shooting was marked by the Punjab government by bringing back Rana Sanaullah to the Law Ministry. One way of looking at it was to see two new ministers. Another is to see Mian Mujtaba Shujaur Rehman stripped of two portfolios, Law, and Finance, leaving him with Excise & Taxation. He should remember that that was a portfolio once held by Ch Akhtar Rasool, now head of the PHF. Of course, Akhtar Rasool had nothing to do with Sepp Blatter, or with the award of any hockey World Cup. The Pakistan hockey team too is a far cry from what it was when Akhtar Rasool was its centre-half and its captain. Another distinguished holder of the portfolio was Makhdoom Mahmud Ahmad, who entered the Cabinet with it as its youngest member. He was later Punjab Governor. And just to raise Mian Mujtaba’s hopes, a holder of the Finance portfolio is now Prime Minister.
Someone should tell that PM, Mian Nawaz Sharif, that one of the major world powers of his Finance Ministry, the USSR, has dissolved. He not only spent time in the Central Asian Republics, Kirghizstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, but when home he got a visit from Aleksandr Lukashenko, the President of Belarus. Belarus is a small country, but it is actually White Russia, and it remains very close to Russia, so its President visiting is a bit like Putin popping over. And with the USA becoming so friendly to India, we need friends, don’t we?
While all of this was going down, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa was having local body polls. The PTI had government officials conduct it. The result was that the PTI won a lot of seats. That was the expected result. Is it a point for the Punjab NS Sindh elections. Actually, the best result for the PTI would have been to lose and then claim that the central government had rigged the election. Which it said it did. Apart from its usual tigrish defence, the PML(N) needs to work out whom to accuse of rigging when it wins the local body elections in Punjab.
Meanwhile, the PML(N) government must be investigating the spy pigeon arrested by India. It lowers Pakistan’s international image if people think it depends on pigeons to do their stuff to mess up India’s works. The wrong impression is created of the ISI, of being bankas doing a little spying now and then, in intervals of pigeon fancying. Actually, considering that bankas were from Lucknow, which is in India, maybe pigeon fancying is what one would expect from RAW.