Express Tribune: By Saroop Ijaz: “While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother,” Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon bears reading over and over again in our milieu for multiple reasons. The immediate reason being the discussion over the future interim prime minister (PM). Mr Moeen Qureshi and Mohammed Mian Soomro, etc. were appointed without much hassle, since the nominations came from ‘gentleman officers’. Yet, when the ‘natives’, for the first time, are to undertake this task, all hell is about to break loose. Never mind that there is a constitutional amendment which lays out the process very clearly. Apparently, adhering to the constitutional procedure is now ‘muk mukka’ (or whatever the new preferred term is). The fact that there is debate on the issue of interim PM is promising. The quality and the level of discourse, on the other hand, are disheartening.
The ever-changing lists appearing in the media have one constant; they overwhelmingly consist of retired judges and, of course, speculations of a retired general or two. What is this fascination with retired judges, be it to head investigating commissions or Public Service Commissions, now PM? I have said this before, there is scant, perhaps no evidence to suggest that retired judges as a group have more (or for that matter less) integrity or ability than the rest of the stock.