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As idiocies go this about takes the cake. Every intelligence outfit is entitled to its share of rubbish and cock-and-bull stories. Without half-fiction and lurid drama to thrive on most intelligence outfits would shrivel, twiddling their thumbs and seeing time hang heavy on their hands.

But the Punjab Special Branch report about the supposed plot to assassinate the Lahore High Court chief justice, the amiable if also often surprising Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, goes beyond the bizarre and actually highlights Pakistan’s most serious problem, more pressing than anything else: the lack of intellect and the lack of humour in the higher echelons of government.

Whether in the inspector general of police’s office or the Home Department, if this report had even vaguely encountered anything resembling intellect it would have been thrown into the nearest dustbin or consigned to the endless shelves reserved for forgotten things.

If it had met anything close to humour it would have been laughed out of court. Or it would have served as zestful topic for mirthful conversation in the never-ending tea breaks observed almost as a religious ritual in all government departments.

The bureaucracy at large, as any keen observer of the phenomenon knows, stopped working a long time ago. Without its tea breaks even the pretence of work would disappear. (Come to think of it, tea is another of our serious problems: too much tea and too little of anything else. Then we complain of the nation’s sluggish blood circulation. With our heavy reliance on tea what else do we expect?)

But to return to our story, this being Pakistan, and in this particular case this being Lahore, this report had to be taken not just seriously but portentously, with the IG police solemnly visiting Justice Sharif and informing him—-not hard to imagine his doleful expression—-about the dark plot afoot against his august person.
And moderation not being one of our prime virtues, the outlines of this heinous plot had to fall into the media’s hands, to become another item of alarm in the long list of all that is going wrong with Pakistan today. If even chief justices are to be assassinated, can things get any worse? And if things are coming to this, shouldn’t something be done to save Pakistan? Where is the C-in-C? Why is he sitting on his haunches? You get the drift of the argument.

Pakistan is forever being saved. Four soldier-presidents have tried doing so, with what happy results we all know. If we could spend less time saving Pakistan and more in trying to run it, things would be different. Some of the clouds on the horizon would lift.

Lahore, it should be noted, has a split personality. The ordinary Lahori is a creature of fun, he/she, more often than not she, given to a raucous, bawdy sense of humour. Lahore’s dancing and singing girls are like no other in the subcontinent, or at least that’s what my sense of patriotism makes me want to think. Although one would have no qualms in admitting that Pakistan’s cultural workers, dedicated to the pursuit of culture in its most primal aspects, would vastly improve matters if they were a bit more Thai about their bathing habits. But about this arcane subject more on some other occasion.

Here’s the split personality: if the average Lahori is a creature of fun, the Lahore sarkar, the bureaucracy presiding over the affairs of Punjab—Pakistan’s largest province, not in terms of area but in terms of everything else—could be a publicity poster of how not to get things done. No one could have invented the Punjab bureaucracy. The unmoveable mass of inertia it has become could only have evolved over a period of time.

I mention this to underscore the point that only in a surreal atmosphere, contributing to a suspension of disbelief, could something like the Sharif assassination report be taken seriously. Now if the Special Branch had pointed a finger at the Taliban that would have been different. It would have shown that after striking at other targets in Lahore—Data Darbar, Ahmedi places of worship, the Karbala Gaamay Shah procession, etc—the Taliban were out to spread more mayhem and chaos, Justice Sharif hardly being a small target. Apart from anything else, he is a popular figure in Lahore, with a wide circle of friends and admirers, and famous for his Kashmiri hospitality. (Although being mortal, he also his detractors.)

But the finger here has been pointed not at sinister killers from the Taliban badlands of Waziristan but, and this is the hilarious part, at a secret cell within the PPP conspiring to hire hardened criminals to kill Justice Sharif. “Some key federal government elements were named in the report as plotters,” as one newspaper story puts it.

If this were imagination running wild there would still be some excuse for it. But this is stupidity on the loose. If this were a film script, there would be no takers for it even in Lollywood, not famous for rejecting implausible scripts. Even the media stories sound a bit forced, as if desperate to arrive at conclusions even when not fully supported by the evidence.

Why should the PPP, otherwise quite capable of the greatest folly—President Zardari’s famous helicopter ride to his French chateau even as floodwaters were rising in much of Pakistan, still fresh in public memory—be out to destabilise itself? It takes little genius to figure out that any plot emanating from whatever quarter in the PPP against Justice Sharif would lead instantly to the federal government’s dismissal, at the hands of the army no less.

We’ve been hearing rumours since the middle of last year that sections of the establishment—for which read ISI, etc—hand-in-glove with sections of the media were out to get Pakistan’s embarrassment of a president. Those rumours subsided earlier this year but with the floods and the seeming incapacity of government at all levels in the face of this crisis, they have picked up again. Indeed, the country is awash with fresh rumours about something cooking in the shadows. But if there was any truth to the Sharif story, no further excuse would be needed for Pakistan’s highest constitutional court, 111 Brigade, to move. Zardari and company would be out in a trice and even the United States would not know what to say.

Which all goes to show how dumb this story-line has been. In Julius Ceasar when the mob catches the wrong Cinna and he says he is not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet, someone from the crowd shouts, “Hang him for his bad verses.” Someone deserves to be strung up for this bad script.

I wouldn’t blame Col Ehsan, the then Special Branch chief, who sent this report to the provincial government. It is the duty of intelligence outfits to pass on what they gather, however far-fetched or outlandish such reports, of course with their own assessments superimposed. But at some point up the chain such reports have to pass the test of common sense. Do they add up? Are they plausible?

If the report was leaked it should have been handled in such a manner as to suggest that the provincial government was not giving it much credence. This is not the impression one gets. Instead, news stories suggest the provincial government was taking this matter very seriously which only makes a laughingstock of the entire chain of command.

All sorts of conspirators, a proliferating breed in Pakistan, are out of the woodwork. Anchor-persons with little else to do are earnestly analysing the imminent or probable demise of democracy. President Zardari, grist to the laughter of the gods when he chooses to speak off-the-cuff, says that any attempt to subvert democracy will be foiled. And floodwaters continue to wreak havoc in Sindh. This should be no time for kite-flying.

Justice Sharif made a name for himself during the anti-Musharraf lawyers’ and judges’ movement by his steadfastness and adherence to principle. He has spread himself a bit thin as Lahore chief justice but that’s another matter. Due to retire soon, long may he preside over his generous cups of Kashmiri hospitality (strictly tea, lest anyone get the wrong idea). As for threats, Lahore has enough real ones to contend with. It can do without invented ones.