Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif calls Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan “a man of crisis” (‘Mard-e-Buhran’), the one who has been leading him out of ‘Buhran’ or crises. In my eyes, Ch. Nisar is also a man of spine i.e he is someone who has the strength of character and moral courage to call a spade a spade.
Such personalities happen to be a rare breed within our political realm, which is usually infested with sycophants and spineless people who don’t have the guts to say the truth. This is despite the fact that historically in Pakistani politics, flattery has usually only led to crisis, since it only depicts a falsely rosy picture which we call ‘sub acha hai’ (everything is good) in Urdu.
On the contrary, the top echelons of governance need candid, realistic opinions given with sincerity in order to be able to put matters on the right track. This fact has been established beyond doubt all over the world, not only in the contemporary times but also in the past that whenever the ruling lot is surrounded by sycophants it is blinded to reality and the real face of things becomes invisible.
At this crucial juncture when the PML-N top brass is faced with an unprecedented and adverse situation, the need for candid advisors has become more intense since ‘introspection is always better than subversion’.
The overall picture of politics is, however, good since there is little space left for exploiters to continue with their exploitation. People have become more aware, civil society has awakened and national institutions have taken it upon themselves to take the country out of morass and deprivations of sorts.
There are people who think that politics has been polluted with mudslinging at almost all the tiers and levels of society and polity, but this is only one angle of a very wide picture.
The Pakistan of today is much different from that of the past when our internal weaknesses would surpass our internal strengths. Now, all segments of society have grown stronger, with the result that the ills of bad or poor governance have been neutralized to a considerable extent.
