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Jailhouse rockers
IF 2024 will be known as the year of seismic general elections, it will also be remembered as the one of unforgettable weddings.
In India, Mumbai is still aglitter in the after-glow of the wedding of Anant Ambani, son of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. The festivities spread over weeks of uncapped extravagance. The total cost has been underestimated at Indian rupees 5,000 crores.
Celebrities to whom a photographer’s flash is as irresistible as a flame is to a moth, gathered in their hundreds. An underdressed Justin Bieber and less costly performers entertained Ambani’s overdressed, obsequious guests. A pantheon of Bollywood idols succumbed to the gravitational pull of his wealth.
BJP’s PM Narendra Modi flew in to give the couple his blessing. The pampered VIP guests included two former British PMs, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. Rishi Sunak would have completed a hat-trick.
Notable absentees were members of the Gandhi family. They remember that when Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother Indira Gandhi married Feroze Gandhi in 1942, she wore not clusters of jewellery retrieved from the vaults of Mumbai’s diamond market, but earrings and bracelets made from fresh flowers. Her khadi sari had been woven from thread spun by her father Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru while in jail during the freedom movement.
Sonia Gandhi chose to wear the same sari for her wedding in 1968, as did her daughter Priyanka Gandhi in 1997. In the Nehru dynasty, power passes not through the barrel of a gun, but via the pallu of a khadi sari.
Mumbai is still aglitter in the after-glow of the wedding.
In Pakistan, a similar ‘quasi-royal’ wedding took place in 1987, when Benazir Bhutto married Asif Zardari. One report mentioned: “She eliminated the dowry, had only two shalwar kameez instead of the traditional nearly 51 dresses, and wore only one layer of jewellery.” (The £117,000 diamond necklace she bought from a Knightsbridge shop was a post-nuptial acquisition.)
More recently, another wedding — that between PTI leader Imran Khan and his wife Bushra — became newsworthy for the wrong reasons. Imran and Bushra Bibi were married in 2018. It was later alleged by her former husband, Khawar Maneka, that the marriage had taken place before the completion of the requisite iddat period of three months. Unchivalrously, he also demanded that “a medical examination of his former wife” be made “to ascertain her menstrual cycle” to confirm his suspicion.
Marriages may be made in heaven: they are unravelled by earthly courts. In any other country, such frivolous litigation would have been given short shrift by any judge, with costs being awarded to the defendants. The court exonerated Imran and Bushra Bibi and ordered that they be freed. Earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in PTI’s favour in the reserved seats case.
Someone, though, behind the scenes, has a zambeel of hidden tricks, a crate of unexploded mangoes. Before the court’s order could be given effect, NAB filed a new application for their continued remand.
How much longer will Imran Khan be kept thus confined?
Some with long memories might see an analogy between two political leaders: the Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the 1970s, and now PTI’s Imran Khan. Their crime was to win a majority. The public has had to bear the punishment.
Sociologists see Pakistan as a country still at war within itself. Its provinces are at loggerheads with each other over the distribution of water and fiscal allocations. Its political parties lunge at each other’s throats for supremacy. Its parliament considers debate and dialogue a waste of spittle. Its superior judiciary is at odds with subordinate courts.
Its elders blame their elders for societal failure. Its youth, like oppressed East Germans, searches desperately for escape tunnels. The public has to surrender its civil liberties because a terrorist (like the Russian Red) lurks under every bed.
The Israeli author Yuval Harari is over-familiar with terrorism. In his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), he writes that terrorists don’t think like army generals. They are like theatre producers. They concentrate on the effect. He cites 9/11 as a prime example and uses its aftermath (Iraq, Afghanistan) to argue that “overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves”.
There are 76 years left in Harari’s century. He advises there is still time to realign our education systems towards the four Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. Time to reform our thinking, time to reinvent ourselves.
In the US, nearly 75 per cent of states have more prisons and jails than degree-granting colleges. In the UK, the new government proposes to release prisoners early to stop jails becoming full in England and Wales. The world needs more schools than jails, and fewer wedding dramas.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2024
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