The shame of Slapping Tournament

While everyone in politics is passionately involved in hitting everyone as hard as they can, nobody is even noticing how pitiable they all look.

Looking for ways to describe the horrific parade of shame national politics has become amidst efforts to pass the 26th Constitutional Amendment? Well, here is an analogy that might help.

In sports, few actions compete in idiocy with the so-called Slapping Contests. Also known as Slap-boxing, or Power Slaps, the competition allows two opponents to smack each other across the face with open hand and attempt to get a knock out. Popularized by a dollar-hungry media industry, the game causes serious injuries to the brain, breaks jaws causing, permanent impairments and disfigurement. That’s is why most players look like bombed caricatures.

The target (the opponent) has to be static, positioned to be hit—unlike other physical contact duels where the competitors adjust to avoid the onslaught.¡!! It is totally humiliating. In most cultures a slap is the worst form of personal insult. Repeated slaps are repeat insults. And yet people play this in the full glare of publicity. They hold up trophies before cheering crowds for compliments to their grand feats. Humans can be depressingly stupid, and yet they have the audacity to make jokes about animals for being self-destructive.

Our political scene approximates everything that happens in Slap-boxing: public humiliation, red-cheeks, battered faces, bleeding noses, opponents tumbling to the ground, winners dazed and barely standing. While everyone is passionately involved in hitting everyone as hard as they can, nobody is even noticing how pitiable they all look.

The government has dragged itself through mud trying to push the amendment through. From the high goal of creating a parallel constitutional court and spearheading the effort to restore the lost power and prestige of the parliament, the chips have fallen so oddly that the government is happy to be slapped down by Maulana Fazlur Rehman on every turn of the way. The government calls it “face-saving.” Just imagine!

Also, they have lost the initiative to the Peoples Party and have made a joke of themselves by calling and postponing National Assembly and Senate sessions forcing even their own members to cry for mercy. The charges of horse-trading and kidnapping of opponents to complete the two thirds majority in both houses are lasting scars the PML-N would not be able to live down. As it is, the wounds of 2024 election controversy have bled the party’s political principles white. With the debris of the amendment falling over them, they have debauched their politics thoroughly.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman of JUI while enjoying media fame and centrality in this slap and smack tournament, too, has suffered. He has to embrace, acknowledge, compliment and endorse Imran Khan, his declared ideological enemy and one he has made a career out of attacking. You have to be a JUI worker to know the impact of this U-turn on the internal debate and how stomach-churning the JUI leaders’ bromance with the PTI is for the ranks.

While the Peoples Party has put a lot of mascara on legitimizing their push for the amendment, and has done so mostly with success, the point is not lost on anyone that the entire “reform the judiciary” argument is a way to ward off the impending dissolution of the elections if judicial Bolsheviks were to take over on 25th of October the Winter Palace that Supreme Court has become. The PPP cannot detach itself from the sordid drama that has accompanied the amendment nor deflect the fiery the criticism that is coming its way. The PPP owns the amendment, and if history doesn’t own it, the party will have a late concussion.

The judges too are slapping each other through their explanations, letter writing, internal inquiries and now out in the open tit for tat strikes. No embellishment of constitutional references can prevent the conclusion that the group aspiring to dictate its terms is aligned with the PTI’s view that this whole system needs to be dismantled and Imran Khan should be cleared to take over the country. But while the judicial slaps are seemingly directed at the government (or the Election Commission) their impact is felt by the Establishment. Each blow to the government is a hard hand landing on the Establishment’s face. Each counter slap that the Establishment releases against the PTI and the group of judges is executed with additional ferocity. This has destroyed the PTI and has caused massive internal bleeding but since the Adiala inmate is bent upon using his last energies to stay in the contest, the party continues to be beaten down.

That same slapping match is mirrored in the media, in civil society, in homes, families, businesses—everywhere you go you see someone receiving or giving a slap. Everywhere you look, you see swollen faces and humiliated names. Never in the history of this country have so many slapped so many to cause so much shame to all. But with all brain cells numbed by endless blows, the bloody sport will continue till everyone’s bones have collapsed and their shorts have fallen off.