Gaffes galore
The gaffes over the means to prolong certain peoples’ tenure continue unabated. Our mole says at the last meeting of The Great Khan’s cupboard, the all-important draft amendment was laid before the members so that it could be sent to Parliament for its stamp of approval. Naturally, no one had the gumption to say that it was sloppily drafted, or that it left legal lacunae open to questioning by detractors. A few cautionary voices said with great temerity that it ought to be vetted carefully before presentation in Parliament. Anyway, the high and mighty got the hint, and back the draft went for fine-tuning.
Protest poetry
Pakistan’s protest poetry is all the rage in India. It is a powerful tool in the hands of the government’s opponents and is being used especially by millennials to demonstrate against Prime Minister Modi’s Hindutva agenda. The irony is that with our classical Urdu protest poetry, comes a resurgence of that precious syncretic culture that was the hallmark of the pre-Partition subcontinent. The same culture that Modi & Co are working so hard to eliminate. So it is that young Indians recite Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s immortal poem “Hum dekhein gay”, with its classical Islamic references. “Voh din kay jiss ka vaada hai, jo loh-e-azal mein likha hai”. Loh-e-azal, meaning the Quranic Tablet of Eternity. “…utthay ga ana-al-haq ka naara …” meaning the famous phrase that Mansur Al-Hallaj, the acclaimed 10th century Sufi mystic pronounced in ecstasy, “I am the Truth”. His teachings unleashed a movement for moral and political reform in Baghdad and he was executed on the Abbasid Caliph’s orders on the banks of the Tirgis in March 922. Hallaj has been a hero ever since to the entire Muslim world’s conscientious objectors. And now to Indian millennials too!