The person getting the most encouragement from Donald Trump’s acquittal by the US Senate is our very own Imran Khan. Now he can get down with a clear conscience to seeking the help of foreign prosecutors to help him prove that Mian Nawaz Sharif is guilty. Of corruption? That would be nice, but not a deal-breaker. Guilty of anything that would take him out of the equation in the next election. And Shehbaz could be proven guilty also, perhaps in another case, it doesn’t matter.
Shehbaz has been indefatigable as usual, suing the Daily Mail for libel. No wonder the cries for Maryam are becoming urgent. With Shehbaz busy consulting legal eagles, who will look after Nawaz? Shehbaz would like to hurry back to Pakistan soon, which is fast becoming a land fit for heroes. The National Assembly has passed an Act making public hanging the punishment for child abuse.
I wonder when we’ll bring back the old punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering, and make it public. For those who don’t know how the English amused themselves once upon a time, the punishment consisted of hanging the convict up by his armpits, then drawing out his intestines after cutting upon his belly and burning them before his eyes (presumably before he fainted from blood loss), and finally quartering its corpse into four quarters, which were sent to the four corners of the kingdom as an example. Why hanging in public? Why not fling the perpetrator before a crowd, which could then tear him to bits?
We never had that punishment, for it had been abolished by the time the Raj was established, and the Penal Code was drawn up. Still, the Raj did have people tied to cannon and then fired it. And before the Raj, under the Mughals, there was the trampling of culprits by an elephant. Public hanging… A judge was accused of brutality for saying that Pervez Musharraf’s corpse should be hanged. Well, child abuse is apparently seen as worse than subverting the Constitution.
What about disease whistleblowers? The Chinese doctor who first said that there was a disease spreading in Wuhand has himself died of the coronavirus. The authorities apparently didn’t like him. Just a month before his death, he was told firmly to stop rumourmongering. OK. That sounds like our police and the age-old practice of burking. Only the epidemic has not gone away but grown instead. Now there are 813 people dead in China, where there have been 37,567 cases. I understand the Chinese authorities are feeling aggrieved. If Trump could get away with the drug deal Rudy Giuliani put together (as John Bolton so felicitously put it), then why were the germs superior to them?
The lie that the virus was caught from bats or snakes has also been nailed. It now seems the coronavirus first infected pangolins, and humans caught it from them. There are eight species of pangolin, which is the only mammal with scales on its skin, four in Asia and four in Africa. And it is much valued in Chinese medicine for its scales, while its meat is a delicacy. It’s smuggled to China on a vast scale, with 10,000 smuggled to China and Vietnam each year.
Now what this shows is that the coronavirus was smuggled into China, and the fault for the epidemic lies in Malaysia or Indonesia, from where the pangolin is illegally smuggled. The doctor who spread the rumour was clearly trying to damage the reputation of the country in the comity of nations. The virus’ spread shows it is a global terrorist, and the only real solution can come after mobile services are suspended. Of course, there are two ways Imran Khan can help. First, he could make a speech. We’ve seen how his speech at the UN solved the Kashmir problem and scared Modi so much that he passed the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Second, he could use his tremendous medical abilities. You know, the ones with which he looked at a picture of the back of Nawaz’s head and saw that he was perfectly fine. If he could only look at the 34,957 cases diagnosed by ignorant fools calling themselves doctors, he’d make the illness go away, by saying it didn’t exist.
There’s another doctor around, Dr Hafeez Sheikh, who’s been tasked with reducing the prices of food items. Yes, like he cut the tomato price by saying that he could supply anyone as many tomatoes they wanted at the old price. Well, at least one other person lives in the same place as Imran, where one can deny anything by saying it doesn’t exist.
Is Imran an ophthalmogist? I ask because the late Wuhan whistleblower was one, though I’ve no idea how any coronavirus case came to his notice. But ophthalmologists have a role in politics. Bashar Al-Assad, the Syrian strongman, is one, as is Abdullah Abdullah, the two-time Afghanistan presidential election loser. In Pakistan, Dr Safdar Abbassi also trained as one. He is the son of Ashraf Abbassi, the former National Assembly Deputy Speaker, the husband of Naheed Khan, the political secretary of Benazir Bhutto, who was another strong woman in his life, being his party leader.
He was in the vehicle she was in when she was killed. But he wasn’t there when Kirk Douglas died at 103. Wow. Old men saw his films when they were children. They don’t make movies like Spartacus any more. Or does memory make the movie good, because it belonged to those happy days.
