Politicians have a peculiar opponent to deal with next time they emerge in public — a shoe. Well, this is no joke. The recent past gives ample evidence to prove this claim right. Arbab Ghulam Rahim, our chief minister until only a couple of months back, was the centre of attention at the Sindh Assembly for all the wrong reasons. As if that was not enough, Sher Afgan Niazi, the ex federal minister, has joined the club of rejected ‘leaders’. Do we have more to come? Keep your fingers crossed. These incidents in the space of the last few days have thrown open a rather funny side of our politics (if I may say so). This is funny in the sense that people have found themselves in the middle of enjoying something and being sorry for it at the same time.

People had not shut their ‘shocked’ mouths at the treatment meted out to Arbab Ghulam Rahim when they saw Sher Afgan being roughed up by the black coats, and others too. Rahim had to confront not just an angry mob when he was deprived of a respectable exit from the excesses committed by him in the previous government. Afgan followed suit. Certainly, the once vote-seekers were caught on the wrong foot despite the fact that they are a different lot. They know when to say what and how much. Many of them are ballot-hardened. Others have braved defeat in elections and, at times, tasted the fruits of success. That makes them able to adjust according to the circumstances and make the right moves. They can shrug off corruption charges with a sleight of hands. They are never terrified by the revengeful stance of the opponents’ government. But things seem to have moved on lately. They will have to watch their steps lest they should become a victim of the pent-up feelings of the masses.

Keeping in view what they had been up to during the hay days of their rule, they must be mentally prepared to face trouble. But they must have hardly realised in what shape and size it will come. In both the incidents, the shoes came as a bolt from the blue for both the politicians. So, was it just a wave of public emotion that swept away any possibility of restraint to be exercised? Partly so.

Conspiracy theorists are not ready to accept the obvious line, that people were simply overwhelmed by the emotions of hatred they had accumulated against their corrupt representatives over the last five years of a fake democratic government.

There are all kinds of analyses, biases, statements and reactions flying around in the wake of these two separate but similar incidents that have kicked up a debate over what is good and what is bad in politics. More interestingly, some people have gone to the extent of drawing a line between ‘good politics’ and ‘bad politics’. Obviously, the backdrop behind this debate is no pleasant happenings that have led people to ask if these episodes were planned. The more questioned is the case of Sher Afgan. Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, the President of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) at the time of writing these lines, pointed to an outsider’s involvement in the whole affair. This is understandable because, according to his rough estimate, there were only forty to fifty percent lawyers in the whole crowd. In that case, who were the other fifty to sixty percent?

There are others who look at the situation from a more ‘different’ angle. The scheme of things, according to the story-makers is that Aitzaz Ahsan is on his way out of the lawyers’ movement and this incident has given him that much-needed space. They are sure that the thrashing of Afgan has killed two birds with one stone — it has thrown a spanner in the so-far unbeaten lawyers’ movement on the one hand and served the purpose of President Musharraf on the other who does not want a certain face back in the Supreme Court. The two events are just another of the twists and turns that the nascent democracy is swiftly taking since it saw the light of the day.

Some quarters in the political arena believe that lawyers should have now taken a pause after the new government was formed and suspended their active opposition until such time that their demands were not met. That did not happen. They even made no bones about their intentions of taking on the new government if it did not see eye to eye on the details of their demands. It is now predictable that it is not going to be a smooth sailing for the government or the lawyers’ community.

At this point, let me bring in a whiff of literary air in a political atmosphere that is both quirky and somber at the same time — quirky because there was hardly a time in our sixty years or so of politics when a ‘leader’ was given a shoe-treatment and that in the thick of a process that we call democracy. The incidents remind one of a poem ‘Patriot into Traitor’ by Robert Browning that can be read as a bad patch in the life of a politician. But literary diversions will not do here. The level of political awareness among the people, even those deeply associated with a political party, has increased to a considerable level. Ours is a different world now, the sooner our politicians understand it the better.