The question is not so much whether the KP police knew about the operation in Katlang, as whether the CM knew. I would think that not only did the police know, but they tried to tell the CM. but he was too deep in his potations to remember anything, which is why he throws out his chest and insists that nobody told anybody in the KP government anything.
He has ordered an inquiry into the incident, which is probably a convenient way of putting it on the backburner. Perhaps the whole operation was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing. And Ali Amin Gandapur was the left hand, even if the KP government wasn’t. I find it difficult to believe that the KP government didn’t know. If it didn’t, then it has the most inefficient SHOs and patwaris in service, and Ali Amin should work on getting some new ones. On the other hand, maybe Ali Amin didn’t know. If he asked, all they had to say was that they told him when he was inter-copula. By now he should be used to not knowing bad news. Only to be told that he was told while under the weather.
However, He’s probably more interested in what’s happening in Mansehra, where Azam Swati is gunning after KP Speaker Babar Swati. Imran said that if Babar was guilty of wrongdoing, he should resign. Azam said that Imran had called for Babar’s resignation. The defence offered by Babar is that he only did what his two PTI predecessors, Asad Qaiser and Mushtaq Ghani. The point of a Speakership is to pack the staff with people from one’s home district. However, Babar is to be given the time to remedy his error, which I suppose means getting rid of his appointees, advertising the posts and then reappointing the people from his district.
Imran’s feelings are not known, about how he feels about the whitewash the cricket team suffered at the hands of New Zealand. True, it meant that nobody was likely to replace him on the same page, but it also left Pakistan with a dilemma: who to make captain. Ireland and Afghanistan are said to be anxious to play Pakistan quickly, while the team is in its present though I suspect they shouldn’t be in such a hurry, because this slump is not temporary. Look at the West Indies. After the halcyon days of the 1990s, the whole 21st century has been an unrelieved series of defeats and disappointments. One symptom that the problem is really bad is the jubilation over the sole win of this tour, in a T20 International.
The best man for this hour of crisis is Azam Khan, our answer to Anant Ambani. Anant mightn’t be in the cricket team, but he’s engaged in a padyatra from his ancestral town of Jamnagar to Dwarka. Which has meant walking an average 20 km a day. Imagine Azam Khan doing a padyatra on a cricket pitch. Come to think of it, that’s what he will be doing every over, and when batting, when he or his partner takes a single. Now that is indeed a sight: him thundering down the pitch for a run. Like a rhino charging. Or an elephant?
There are carpers who will complain that he has no previous experience. Big deal. The team can’t get worse than it is. Well, it can, To find out, just make Shan Masood captain in all three formats.
There have been other occasions for sorrow off the cricket field. Actor Val Kilmer passed away at 65. I remember him first as the Iceman, the rival to the Tom Cruise character in Top Gun, and then in the sequel, which showed him as Commander Pacific and a four-star admiral, but with a cancer diagnosis. That was art imitating life, for he had throat cancer by then. He played Batman and the Saint, but he was in The Ghost and The Darkness too, which was a tremendous movie.
If Hollywood lost Kilmer, Bollywood lost Manoj Kumar. He was no longer active, for he was 86. But his loss was probably felt most deeply in BJP circles, for his films were not just patriotic, but xenophobic.
Bollywood was luckier in not suffering any loss, even though it seems to be experiencing something of a revival, with six films released this Eid. A sobering thought: everyone associated with those movies, from the hero to the lowliest spot boy, will one day be no more. Nor will the writer of these notes, nor you, gentle reader.
