LAHORE: Perhaps the nicest thing about our Prime Minister is his courage. While the Supreme Court was rattled by the rise in the number of new covid-19 cases and the deaths due to it, to rescind its orders to open markets, Imran Khan is not turning back. He remains against lockdowns. Though he’s admitted that Covid-19 is not just another flu.
He also wants the petrol to keep flowing, despite all the machinations of Mian Nawaz Sharif. He intends to find the corrupt mafia which is keeping petrol out of the market. And obviously, the head of that mafia must be Nawaz. Unless it’s Shahbaz.
Shahbaz getting the coronavirus is no excuse for keeping petrol out of the market. Though it does show that he was right to object to going to NAB. All of those NAB officials sneezing all over him, and coughing all over him, were not doing so for nothing. It would be a turn-up for the books if now NAB was to exempt him from appearances because NAB officials refused to see him for fear of infection.
More leading members of both the PML(N) and the PTI continue to go down. I wonder if this is because of meetings.Or does some Pir Sahib favoured by politicos have the infection, and thus a very powerful damm?
Well, with schools still closed, virtual classes still prevail, with things having changed. Kids no longer asl permission to go the john. They just go, presumably on the principle that “When a man’s gotta go, he’s gotta go.”. Of course, if they’re using a smartphone rather than a laptop, they can take their classroom into the john, which gives a whole new meaning to the idea of the strain of learning. Despite this new flexibility, some things don’t change. Like incessant pleas for the marking of attendance. But the plea of poor connectivity as an explanation is a new one. In my day, you killed off a grandmother. Of course, if you killed a third grandmother, and if the teacher remembered, you could be in trouble. Imran has threatened to have a strict lockdown if people don’t obey the SOPs on social distancing.
I wonder if he is looking to Kenya as an example. I mean, the cops there seem to take the lockdown orders very seriously. To the extent that they’ve killed six people, including a kid on a balcony in Nairobi. They even had some protests under the ‘Black Lives Matter’ rubric, even though the cops doing the killing weren’t white, but as black as their victims.
But it was as if to show that it wasn’t black lives that matter, but only those of American blacks, that protests erupted in the USA when the Atlanta police shot dead a young black man in the parking lot of a fast-food joint’s parking lot. Expect a deafening silence from the White House.
It was almost as if someone thought the protests which had broken out since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. George was buried in his native Houston. While his brother has testified to Congress.
Oh yes, and Gone With The Wind has been pulled off for the Net for viewing. And NASCAR has forbidden the Confederate flag from being brought its races.
It’s also a time to tear down statues. It started with the statue of a slave trader, Edward Colston, in Bristol, and it got to Confederate generals. That of Confederate President Jefferson Davis had his statue torn down in Richmond, Virginia. Gandhi’s statue in the UK is to be torn down, for the racism he showed against blacks when he was in South Africa.
I wonder when there will be a move to rename Sudan, as well as South Sudan, because the word means ‘Country of the Blacks’. As a matter of fact, when General ‘Chinese’ Gordon was killed there back in 1888, he was there on an anti-slavery mission. But I do understand the friendship between Trump and Narendra Modi. Trump wants the old Confederacy names to stay on US military bases, even though they all opposed the Union. And Modi wants every trace of Muslim rule removed from India. So not only are they both anti-Muslim, they’re also both racists.
Of course, Modi is one-up, because the religion he espouses is founded on the four castes, or varnas, or colours. Trump, on the other hand, belongs to a religion which espouses the equality of all, but which not only countenanced the slave trade, but said that Ham was meant to serve his brother Sam and Japheth, Noah’s other two sons. In fact, maybe they’re anti-Muslim because it stresses the quality of races and colours in a way unequalled by any other faith.
