Surgical strike

SURGERY is also called an operation, and the place where it is performed is called an operating theatre. All types of surgery must be considered serious. A common measure of how serious it could be is whether it will be performed under local or general anaesthesia. The former entails a procedure that does not require long-term hospital recovery, whereas the latter necessitates it because of the more invasive nature of the surgery and the recovery from general anaesthesia. These terms seep into political and administrative systems, depending on the health of the polity. The more its health deteriorates, the more you hear of operations like Clean-up. Surgical strikes are usually preceded by strafing to soften the target, for an anaesthetic effect, if you like. The surgery being referred to is the proposed 28th constitutional amendment , which has been in the making for a long time. Its extremely invasive nature required that the patient not only be numbed into a comatose state but also be made to suffer so much before the surgery that they would be thankful just to be alive, even if a wrong organ is amputated during the operation. Let us assume that the amendment is passed. How are citizens supposed to react? The surgery does not affect all the limbs of our body politic equally. Punjab may not mind, thinking it has lost only a gallbladder, whereas Sindh may feel like a quadriplegic post-procedure. Balochistan and KP may see it as a near-death experience. A more nuanced question is: who is Punjab? Is it the PML-N vote bank or the waseb nationalists? What do we mean by ‘how would Sindh react?’ Is it the PPP constituent, MQM, or Sindhi nationalists? What about the Pakhtuns, whose largest concentration is in Karachi? How will citizens react to the amendment? Could rural and urban Sindh be considered a monolith? Of course not. While the PPP has enjoyed a majority in the Sindh Assembly for close to two decades, it ...

Original source: Dawn Pakistan