Monday, May 2, 2011

What Passes For Political Debate

Only a couple of weeks ago, I had posted a couple of exchanges on live television which provided a sad commentary on the levels political debate in this country had sunk to. One of those exchanges involved Jang columnist and Geo presenter Hasan Nisar and the PML(N)'s Senator Mushahidullah. We had no hesitation in laying the fault for that disgraceful verbal sparring at the feet of Nisar and had called on him to offer apologies.

But it seems Mr Mushahidullah is no stranger to crudities on television. See the following clip from News One's Bang-e-Dara programme with host Faisal Qureshi from April 28 (thanks to Jalal Hussain for bringing it to our notice). The target of Mushahidullah's seemingly petty wrath (thankfully, we are spared the worst of it because of News One's bleeps) is Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf's Secretary General Dr Arif Alvi.




Having watched the entire programme here, I can safely say that no one in the programme comes away with flying colours. Dr. Alvi's smugness and self-righteousness is grating as are the host's overtly partisan interjections once he too loses his cool. Dr Alvi's snipes when Mushahidullah first tries to answer the host's questions precipitate the eventual free-for-all. The less said about the screeching Nargis Faiz Malik, PPP MPA in the Punjab, the better. However, none of the political provocations provides an excuse for Mushahidullah's final descent into bazaari language.  Some people, it seems, just don't know the meaning of the phrase 'earning respect.'


5 comments:

. said...

Faisal Qureshi is quite the idiot. Of course its his responsibility to control the discussion which he makes absolutely no effort to do. And when the discussion predictably gets sour he makes no attempt to interject till the end when he absurdly gets on his high horse and starts trashing PML-N only because Mushadullah told him (rightfully) he should ask Arif to not interrupt while he was talking.

Paki Kaki said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Maiwand said...

After watching the full program, I came to the conclusion that all implicitly acknowledge that they are thieves, products of agency's engineering,filthy rich and so on. the only disagreement is that who tops the list.

Quaid once said that Pakistan is a laboratory and he was soooo right. but he forgot to mention that is also a zoo among other things.

Anonymous said...

satiya gia hai bhudha...

Jawad said...

To be fair, to me the PTI guy was defending himself but he should not have butted in. As for Mushahidullah Khan the man who is famous for getting threatened by the MQM on air,and gotten the worst on air verbal posterior kicking by Hassan Nisar, looks like he was trying to outdo himself