11 March 2011By Saeed Qureshi
Don Quixote is the hero of a 17th
Spanish novel with the same title written by
Miguel
de Cervantes. Don Quixote is a
queer megalomaniac figure who sets out to fight
against the wrong doers. He perceives phantom and
imaginary enemies and is ready to put up a fight in
which he invariably comes out humiliated, beaten up
and injured. He performs several foolish acts of
chivalry and adventures one of which is attacking the
windmills with his lance. The term tilting at the
windmills imagining them to be giants was coined from
this mirthful act of Don Quixote.
The windmills knock him and his
horse Rocinante with terrible injuries and broken
body. He has been portrayed as a buffoon who has an
impulsive tendency to enter violently into matters
that do not concern him. His propensity for avoidable
fracas generate great humor and some time pity for
this idiotic hero who loses in all encounters but
seldom loses hope and self-magnifying feelings of
chivalry.
We have a Don Quixote in Pakistan
too. He is incidentally the interior minister of
Sindh
province and also the senior vice president of the
largest party, the Pakistan People's Party now in
power at the center and province of Sindh. Our Don
Quixote has claimed many a time that no mother has
produced a bigger goon than him and that he was along
with others ( the word ‘we' used) were committing the
acts of wanton terrorism now plaguing
Karachi
the Largest city of Pakistan.
Goon he is but a goofy goon. By
his deafening harangue full of sound and fury,
signifying threats and gauntlets, he has qualified
himself to be the
Frankenstein of his party that
still has roots in the masses. With his public abusive
sermons, he has inflamed the political climate in
Karachi which needs prudence and discretion to win the
hearts of the opponents for a much sought after peace
and social tranquility in Karachi.
He speaks with uncontrollable
gusto and force, gushes out volleys of slander and
abuses in his speeches. He forgets that the audiences
were not impressed by his exhuberance and thunderbolt
rhetoric but incensed by his ludicrous claims. His
fire-spitting bombastic oration with stress on each
word that he pronounces make one believe as if a
declamation contest was taking place on a theatrical
stage. His twirled moustache also strikes awe in the
minds of the listeners.
Several times, in his convoluted
wisdom he has heaped invectives, on MQM for unleashing
terrorism on Karachi and killing the innocent citizens
for insidious motives. Then he lashed out at
Punjab
government and the
ruling party there PMLN. He
warned that if the PPP coalition in Punjab was wound
up and the PPP ministers were sent home, he would
retaliate in a most diabolic manner. That diabolic
reprisal was to shut and ransack all the PMLN offices
from Karachi to Kashmore.
The PMLN government of
Shahbaz Sharif did forsake the
PPP ministers and bade them unceremonious farewell.
The area mentioned by the volatile interior minister
is calm and the kind of civil war that he predicted is
still invisible.
And of late, he once again
lambasted at the MQM and reviled them for being a
terrorist band of killers. Furthermore, forcefully
rejecting the accusations of target killings against
the PPP peace committees, he boastfully showered
accolades on these peace committees. Challenging the
MQM, he declared that from now onward he would openly
sponsor and own these PPP peace committees as their
god-father even if these were involved in criminal
activities.
With his insane and unguarded
diatribe, hard hitting vitriolic and unwarranted crazy
challenges to his political foes and allies, he has
put the PPP in the most difficult situation. President
Zardari, every time tries to repair the damage done to
his policy of conciliation and tolerance, but this
gentleman takes it back to the square one, making more
mess than before.
Ostensibly he is delving in
unbridled absurdities because of his close links with
the chairman of the party, and also as being the self-
touted senior vice president of the PPP. His
illustrious and highly dignified wife Fehmida Mirza is
the speaker of the National Assembly.
But he should be bridled and
leashed so that the PPP already in deep waters should
have the necessary breathing space to recuperate its
lost prestige and sagging popularity. Because of such
unscrupulous individuals as Dr. Zulfikar Mirza is, and
their overly threatening postures and professed
banditry, PPP would sink further and more rapidly into
the abyss of public distrust and despising. Besides it
would lose the much needed support of its allies as
MQM which is now fed up with Dr. Mirza's off repeated
smearing outburst and is in the wake of leaving its
coalition with the PPP.
It is vitally imperative for the
chairman of the PPP and also the
president of Pakistan
Jinab
Asif
Ali Zardari to counsel this
overactive and hyper member of the PPP and firmly tell
him to restrain his rage and rancor against a very
intimate ally MQM and also the second largest party
PMNL.
This remedial measure would keep
in place the president's policy of building up
national consensus, solidarity and unity to address
and redress the gubernatorial issues that Pakistan is
faced with. If PPP loses power and MQM parts company,
Dr. Mirza would be solely responsible for such a grave
debacle. That would be a death knell for the political
future and integrity of PPP for quite some time.
The writer is a senior journalist
and a former diplomatTo
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