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Sharif checkmates Pakistani establishment

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( forwarded by Dr. Ehtisham)Gradually the PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) government is losing its grip on power, as the political opposition not only has pushed it on to the back foot but has also weakened the military establishment’s control of the power chessboard.

On Sunday, the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), and alliance of opposition parties, held its third massive public gathering, this time in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province. As expected, the PDM leaders while addressing the crowd directly blamed the establishment for backing an inept government and accused it of rigging the ballot.

However, it was former prime minister Nawaz Sharif who again blamed General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lieutenant-General Faiz Hameed for overthrowing his government and bringing Imran Khan to power through a rigged political discourse.

By naming Bajwa and Faiz, Sharif successfully created the narrative that he is not against any institution but only a few individuals. He was right on the money, as he not only criticized the generals for meddling in politics but also raised the issues relevant to Balochistan province.

However, this time it was his daughter Maryam Nawaz who stole the show by highlighting the issue of enforced disappearances in Balochistan. While addressing the public gathering, she called on to the stage a woman whose three brothers had gone missing. She showed the face of that woman to the public and roared, “Have some shame, think what happens to you if your kids going missing.”

She was of course referring to the military establishment, and perhaps she won the hearts of many in Balochistan.

A calm and composed Maryam highlighting the issue of enforced disappearances and directly criticizing the establishment are signs that Pakistan has changed. Someone had to break the chains of fear and slavery and challenge those who have been responsible for creating a manipulative social and political order to keep their hegemony intact, and who else but a mainstream party based in Punjab could have challenged the deep state so effectively?

A thrice-elected prime minister addressing PDM rallies from his base in England accusing the establishment of manipulating the social and political order while his daughter showed solidarity with the relatives of the missing persons of Balochistan has surely brought the small provinces closer to Punjab. At the same time, the unprecedented brave stance of Sharif and Maryam has put the establishment under immense pressure.

Meanwhile, the detailed verdict of the Supreme Court of Pakistan on the presidential reference against Justice Qazi Faez Isa has also left the hybrid regime red-faced. The highest court in its detailed judgment declared that the reference against Isa was baseless and not according to the constitution.

Now that Isa, a bold and upstanding judge, has been given a clean chit, the government is facing the embarrassment of losing its case against him, further weakening this hybrid regime.

The panic among the ranks of the PTI government and in the establishment is visible. In Karachi, the chief of Sindh provincial police was kidnapped by the Rangers, a paramilitary federal law enforcement organization, and was forced to register a case against Maryam Nawaz and her husband for chanting slogans of “respect my vote” at the grave of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The move backfired within hours as the entire Sindh police department stood by their chief and submitted applications for leave. General Bajwa, the Chief of Army Staff, himself had to call on Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and the Sindh police chief to ease the situation.

Then on Saturday, a journalist with Geo News went missing after he aired surveillance-camera footage of Rangers breaking down the door of Maryam’s hotel room. That move also backfired, as after immense pressure from the public the journalist was released within 22 hours.

On Sunday in Quetta, Internet and mobile-phone services were suspended by the Balochistan government to disrupt live broadcasting of the PDM public gathering on social media, but this move also backfired, as not only did the opposition somehow manage to show the gathering live, but Sharif was able to deliver his speech from London.

This series of failures by the establishment while both Sharif and Maryam fearlessly take on the military elite indicates that the winds have changed in Pakistan’s power corridors. Both Bajwa and Faiz have been weakened to the point that they are now being criticized openly by the opposition parties.

After all, no general can afford controversies and public anger against him. Even dictators like Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf were not able to bear the pressure of public criticism and resentment against them. So it will also be not possible for either Bajwa or Faiz to withstand the pressure against them.

Under these circumstances when the establishment itself is on the back foot, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government will not be able to launch a crackdown against the opposition and dissident journalists. This means Khan’s fate is decided and he at any moment could be sacrificed to save the establishment from the growing criticism of the public.

However, the question is, will Sharif be content to see the removal of Imran Khan only? The answer is a clear no, as he and Maryam have both adopted a stance from where they cannot retreat, as public expectations are now too high.

And why should they change their stance of bringing Bajwa and Faiz to accountability, that too at a time when their narrative of civilian supremacy is becoming popular across the entire country? A fresh election may not suit the PPP, but it will suit all the other opposition parties, and that is why they have put their stakes with Sharif, who has nothing to lose at the moment.

The attempt to remove Sharif and Maryam from the political scene has backfired, and the establishment’s doctrine of running a controlled democracy has collapsed, as the miserable economic condition of the masses has created huge resentment against Imran Khan and his backers.

The image of Khan created through the media may still be relevant in the posh areas of the country, but in the downtown areas and in the middle-class localities of the cities and towns, his image has been tarnished by his lack of ability to govern the country and inability to stop inflation and revive the economy.

The global players who supported the de facto coup against Sharif have distanced themselves from the PTI government and its backers. Perhaps it is time for those who rigged the political discourse to ask themselves what they achieved by meddling in politics. It was a game that could never have been won by the establishment, as Sharif was not an ordinary political leader.

A shrewd person like Sharif would never have taken the risk of going all out against the establishment unless he was certain that he was going to win this battle. He had the history of infrastructure mega-projects, electricity projects and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to his credit, and it was impossible for any other political party or dictator to match his performance.

It was not difficult to understand that the way elections were rigged there were no chances of bringing political stability back. Perhaps the generals who launched the Naya Pakistan project were unaware that they were inflicting political and economic turmoil on the country.

Now it is not only about new elections and sending Imran Khan and his backers packing but it is about redefining the political and social contracts between the citizens and the state. Even if the joint opposition settles for less, at least Maryam and Sharif will not settle for anything less than the removal of Khan and his few remaining supporters and devising new ways of doing business, where every institution will work under its defined constitutional role.

This is a checkmate by Sharif and for now, there is no way out for the establishment but to go back to its constitutional role of protecting the geographical borders of the country and leaving everything else to the elected representatives of the country.

Imad Zafar is a journalist and columnist/commentator for newspapers. He is associated with TV channels, radio, newspapers, news agencies, and political, policy and media related think-tanks.

Asia Times Financial is now live. Linking accurate news, insightful analysis and local knowledge with the ATF China Bond 50 Index, the world’s first benchmark cross sector Chinese Bond Indices. Read ATF now.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/sharif-checkmates-pakistani-establishment/ 

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The brilliance and brutality of Lucian Freud

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Freud could be selfish, amoral and cruel. But he lived and painted with feverish intensity. 

There is a much darker side to his life, too. The relentless womanising, including with vulnerable people far, far younger than him; the children so numerous they were hard to keep track of; the brutal break-ups, vicious feuds and spasms of verbal cruelty that made Freud, for many people, an impossibly sulphurous figure, a coldly brilliant predator smoking with menace. Observing him at the Jewish wedding in London of the painter RB Kitaj, the poet Stephen Spender whispered to Feaver: “I can’t stand being in the same place with Lucian. He is an evil man.”

How is a biographer and a friend supposed to bridge this impossible gap of perception? Freud’s doctor, Michael Gormley, perhaps comes nearest to a balanced picture when he described him as “one of those wonderful people who owned his self. His selfishness. He had an addictive personality. Addictive people love intensity; it’s the nature of the personality, ruling everything…”

This intensity makes him a glorious subject for biography. In this second volume, taking the story from 1968 to 2011, Feaver lacks the jaw-dropping Hogarthian quality of the early life, with its cast of gangsters, stoned aristocrats and Soho bacchanals. These, by contrast, are the decades dominated by grand exhibitions in London, Paris and New York, feuds with collectors and galleries, friendships with the (very) rich and famous, from Kate Moss to Arnold Goodman, and the steady succession of masterworks emerging from his various studios.

You wouldn’t have thought that any of this could possibly be as interesting as the hungry years. Yet Feaver has written a second great page-turner, one of the finest art biographies I know. Part of that comes about because of the artist’s authentic voice, meticulously recorded in all those conversations. By the time the book closes, you hear Freud ringing inside your head, with his sibilant Germanic accent, his subtlety, anxiety and humour. Asked about how it feels when an old picture sells for £1m, he responds: “I can only say that it feels like hearing that an overbearing great-aunt I had no contact with has been eaten by cannibals.”

Yet, behind the jokes there is often tragedy. The background tone is black, even with aunts. Discussing his lack of enthusiasm for showing in Vienna, Freud explains: “My great-aunts, when the Nazis put them into the concentration camp, were in their sixties. One went to the head of the camp and said, ‘We aren’t ordinary persons that have been roped in, because we are half-sisters of a very great man [Sigmund Freud]. Could you put us to death right away?’ So they did. It’s not secret. My father told me that…” If Freud was a strange one, who lived always at full throttle and had a horror of wasting the gift of life, you can see why.

Part of that intensity is displayed through his unusual attitude to money. During the first part of this volume, even as he is creating his greatest paintings, Freud is still being sneered at by the London critics and earning far less than his one-time friend and rival Francis Bacon. He loses huge amounts betting. For many years he was banned from racecourses after a feud about Northern Irish banknotes. When money does come in, he often hands it straight to somebody who is in need, or who has simply asked. Similarly, he expects to borrow whenever he needs to and likes to keep a fat stash of banknotes always close to hand. Once he does become very rich, gambling loses its appeal (because he can afford to lose), and the sitters/girlfriends receive more and more extravagant presents. It is, in short, a thoroughly un-bourgeois attitude to wealth.

The same cannot, sadly, be said for the cast list. As characters, his dealers and collectors are inevitably duller than the street urchins and wide boys of the earlier volume. The most remarkable characters here are the famous sitters, Leigh Bowery and “Big Sue” Tilley, the benefits supervisor. But what gives this book its rocket fuel is Feaver’s close attention to the work itself. The paintings are the real characters. We feel and understand that the making of a major one is itself a dramatic, even theatrical, episode – the centre of the life.

The most thrilling example is probably the making of his 1981-83 masterwork, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau), with his friends and children squeezed on to an iron bed in a scabrous, peeling studio, a tap running to one side. The psychological tensions and the physical difficulties of making this entirely successful painting are brilliantly described – the changes of direction, the rubbings-out, the sheer intellectual effort.

In other cases, the studio dramas can be high comedy. In 1998, Freud was working on another large interior. One sitter, Francis Wyndham, is reading a book in the foreground, while the other, Jerry Hall, then married to Mick Jagger, is seen breastfeeding her new baby in the sunlit background. The assumption was that Jagger would buy the final painting. Unfortunately, to Freud’s fury, Hall proved unreliable: she kept failing to turn up for the sittings. A battle of wills began. Who was the more important, the supermodel or the artist? Gleefully, Freud resolved this by simply painting her out and substituting David Dawson, his studio assistant and amanuensis, suckling Hall’s child with his male breast. Freud dropped Hall a note, casually explaining, “You’ve turned into a man”, and told Feaver: “With the baby, David looked more like a mother.” According to Freud’s dealer at the time, “Jagger went crazy”, though the painting was immediately sold. Jerry Hall morosely summed up: “He scratched me out.”

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What I’ve Learned From Teaching Online-By Muhammad Hanif

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(Great column by Muhammad Hanif, a novelist turned teacher. f.sheikh)

“Let’s read,” I told the students in my writing class, trying to invoke the authority of my own high-school literature teacher. I was hoping they would unzip their backpacks, pull out the books and start reading. I had become a visiting teacher at a university in Karachi, Pakistan, a couple of years before the pandemic, and I was struggling. It felt nice to be called a professor, but I was reluctant to call my students, “my students.”

After a lifetime in journalism and of writing books, teaching seemed like a proper grown-up job. If you get something wrong in a newspaper article, you try to do better the next time. When your novel’s plot goes wonky, you can try a different approach — or repeat the same mistakes and give them another title.

But when I started teaching, I realized that I wasn’t likely to get a second chance with the mind of a 20-year-old.

I tried to make up for my inexperience with gray-haired authority. I wanted students to read what I loved, but I wasn’t quite ready for how they read it.

That day two years ago, instead of opening their bags, they pulled out their phones, as if they had just received an important message or needed to call someone to tell them about the confused man in their class. Noticing the panic on my face, one student pointed out that they were doing their reading on their phone.

It took me a few more classes to accept the fact that they had our whole damn syllabus on their phones and were actually reading, not watching TikTok videos.

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