Disgusted

Islamabad, May 20: The paraglide plunge had been smooth but for Nilofar Bakhtiar, the political fall has been hard.

The Pakistan tourism minister has quit her cabinet post, falling a victim to the Pakistani moral police over the hug she gave her 70-year-old instructor after a successful para jump in Paris in April.

The 8,000-foot jump was meant to raise funds for Pakistan’s earthquake-affected children, but to Bakhtiar’s amazement religious extremists attacked her “for the un-Islamic act of hugging a stranger”. Clerics issued a fatwa asking her to repent or face trial by a shariat court they had set up.

The minister held out for a while but resigned after her own party, the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, refused to stand by her.

While hugging an aged trainer hardly compares with a kiss from a Hollywood hunk, India and Pakistan aren’t too different when it comes to guardians of morality blowing issues out of proportion and targeting perceived offenders.

In recent weeks, a court issued an arrest warrant against US actor Richard Gere for pecking Bollywood heroine Shilpa Shetty on the cheek at an AIDS/HIV function.

In both countries, groups claiming to represent the majority community are the chief rabble-rousers. This month, a student in Vadodara was arrested and denied bail for days over his paintings of nude goddesses while saffron hoodlums vandalised his “obscene” art exhibition.

Days earlier, another court had ordered the attachment of artist M.F. Husain’s property because of similar paintings.

Like their peers in India, many politicians in Pakistan too are afraid to stand up to the hawks.

After some PML-Q members censured Bakhtiar, party president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussein asked her to resign as party women’s wing chief.

Bakhtiar, among the more educated and courageous members of the pro-establishment party, agonised for several weeks and then quit both her party and government posts.

A local paper quoted her as saying she had resigned “in disgust” at the treatment from her party. “Nobody stood by me during these weeks and hence I am putting down my cabinet post,” she said.

She would be even more disturbed to know that Sumaira Malik, a close friend of President Pervez Musharraf, has replaced her. It’s the second shock in months for Bakhtiar: in late 2006, Aziz had eased her out of the women’s affairs ministry and put Malik in charge.

“It’s a tale of back-to-back rise and fall of two women in the corridors of power and favour… while one escalated the ladder with amazing rapidity, the other was sliding downhill in equal haste,” The News quoted an unnamed observer as saying.

“Malik enjoys solid backing of President Musharraf. In government and social circles of the capital, Bakhtiar had to face slights, snide looks and jibes for her fall from favour to the attractive and elegant Sumaira Malik,” wrote senior columnist Afzal Khan in an e-column.

Malik, niece of former President Farooq Leghari and granddaughter of Ayub Khan’s powerful governor Nawab Kalabagh, was the lone minister at the Musharraf-Manmohan Singh meeting in Havana last year. She also toured the quake-hit areas in October 2005 and later became part of Musharraf’s entourage.