CITY NOTES
Fans of bhangra rap have been shocked by the murder of Shubheep Singh Sidhu, better known as Sidhu Moose Wala, who as gunned down in Mansa as the result of an inter-gang rivalry.
I’ve known that the original rappers, all fine upstanding members of the African-American community, would get gunned down with depressing frequency. But it seems that this is extending to East Punjab.
The East Punjab police must have egg on their face, because theory withdrew the security from Sidhu, along with 400 others, in a bid to end the VIP culture there. So long as there isn’t a round now of doubling security for existing VIPs. It wouldn’t be so bad if other Punjab VIPs made the claim. But just watch our VIPs suddenly remembering their drug connections.
However, the team around Imran Khan must get ready for the new challenge. They should realise that gang warfare can be used as an excuse, and someone might decide to make the stories a reality: Imran is talking freely of the threat to his life. Let’s hope the Punjab police might realise that he’s an ex-PM, apart from the captain of the 1992 World Cup winners.
The Punjab police over here is probably turning against the PTI because of the way one of its supporters, clad in a burqa, was videoed during the Long March in Islamabad following a constable, calling him repeatedly a ‘piece of sh-t’.
Though in a burka, the PTI supporter proved she was ‘foreign-return’. The cop has been complimented for his patience, but I suspect he didn’t understand what was being said to him. The English was too ‘high’. I mean, PTI supporters should try cops with Punjabi oaths. Then we’d see how forbearing they would be. Nobody joined the Punjab police in the hope of being called names.
Nobody became Punjab Governor to be sworn at either, and Baleeghur Rehman has come because it’s a nice job, not because you would be called inappropriate names. His arrival means that Hamza Shehbaz can remain CM even though the PTI members voting for him are disqualified.
If the Governor doesn’t ask him to take a vote of confidence, his next test will be the passage of the budget. That can be done with a simple majority of those present and voting. If Speaker Pervez Elahi wants to be nasty, and he probably will, he can force a division on every vote, which will leave the Treasury exhausted.
One of the things the Punjab government wants to avoid is too much proliferation of weapons. Moose Wala’s killing may be just the thin edge of the wedge. We’ve got noises emerging from Imran Khan’s camp of civil war, and bringing the KP police to the next Long March.
There’s an element of envy that we aren’t like the USA, where there’s been the usual school killing, store killing, church killing, and so on. However, some sort of apotheosis was reached in Charleston, Cirginia, where a man who had been warned about dangerous driving in a street where there was a party with lots of children running around, came back with an assault rifle.
Before he could use it, one of the women partygoers pulled out her handgun and shot him dead. That put me in mind of the musical Annie Get Your Gun! That was based on the life of Annie Oakley, the 19th century female sharpshooter who was part of Buffalo Bill’s show. Annie Oakley was a great believer in female self-defence. Does that mean we are going to see Dr Shireen Mazari take inspiration too, and turn up at the next Long March with a machine gun?
People are not happy with the police, though. Nor how a motorcyclist was beaten to death in Gujranwala on suspicion of theft. It made me wonder: maybe Imran shouldn’t be blamed for the accusation-as-proof philosophy by which he has operated so far. Maybe he’s just expressing the widely held belief that there’s no smoke without fire, with innocence until proven guilty just a piece of liberal nonsense.
