Letter From Lahore - December 6, 2002

Smile when you talk to me. Mister! The spanking new Prime Minister is Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali to you; to me he was a fresh young pupil all of 40 years ago. He is the very first Premier from the province of Balochistan, and comes from the traditional Baloch gentry; even then he had a rather incongruous and serious politeness for a 20-year-old.

True to form he went into politics and has remained there since; winning and losing elections and ending up in most provincial cabinets or Chief Ministerships.

Twenty years on, I caught up with him again when he came for his son's admission to the old college. That is the price one pays for being an educationist. Being passed down from generation to generation! I recall the time I met this American lady, and she asked where I taught, and I said Government College in Lahore. And she said, "Now hold on! Is that the one that supplies half the Legislature or the one that mans half the bureaucracy?" The other one is the Aitchison College, which was set up by the British for the Punjab Chiefs‚ or the landed gentry, and naturally most of them end up in politics...

The Alhamra is a complex of theatres and art galleries in the centre of Lahore, and we were rehearsing a play there, and in a lull the director came and whispered that they were about to inaugurate an art exhibition and the minister was there, and would I like to come join in?

As I walked in, a young man came rushing and yelling, "Sirjee! And he knelt and hugged my knees. I recognised him and said so, "I know you. You used to sit at the back of the class and hum through economics!" I felt the director discreetly digging me in the ribs, "Sir, he is the Minister, and guest of honour, and would you like to keep your voice down until he cuts the tape?" In 40 years, you gather a few former pupils.

Like when Nawaz Sharif was Premier here, our neighbours had I. K. Gujral Saab, who had been taught by my father-in-law. Mutual friends had great hopes of the juxtaposition, ho, ho! Much later, we met Gujral Saab in Delhi. He was former Premier then, but he had full protocol and staff and a lovely official residence. He was presiding over a function in the evening, and I asked him how one went round applying for the job of former Premier in Delhi. He was much amused. Then I explained to the audience that I had to ask because back home in Lahore we treated former premiers a shade differently! That brought the house down.

For the rest of politics it is the familiar story. The man most in the news has been Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan. He is the chief of a rather rickety alliance of all the parties except the one now in power, and he was not amused by Jamali winning the race for Premier. Mostly, he was angry with his own alliance‚ who had fielded two candidates for Premier, instead of agreeing on one who could have given Jamali a run for his money.

As he has done dozens of times before, he resigned from his chiefship‚ in the morning, but by the time it was evening - and the Iftaar party - he had been persuaded to withdraw his resignation. It all seems a bit pointless because even if his alliance had agreed on one candidate, he would have got their 150 votes, and Jamali with his 172 would still have won.

But the press had to make much of it because he is the acknowledged senior politician‚ although he has never actually won an election in his life, and had announced his retirement before the present one - mostly because he never graduated from college, and stood disqualified.

I hasten to add that he is an erudite man, and a poet of considerable merit. And he is also about 90 years old! So now he has got busy tinkering with his alliance to see if they can come up with a single Leader of the Opposition.