POREG VIEW: Ever since Pakistan is marooned in unprecedented floods, and the Zardari-Gilani administration failed to rise to the occasion, army and its chief Gen Kayani have become the darlings of the masses. Across the country, wherever people are in distress it is the army columns that have been rendering assistance often at great risk to their own lives. Kayani himself is in a hands-on-mode with the relief operations, hopping from one distress place to another. And people have begun to long for the Khaki rule unaccustomed as they are to democracy, which, based on their experience, is  never no more than a rule by squabbling politicians with feet of clay.

Giving vent to the popular feeling, the London based MQM chief Altaf Hussain, whose fiefdom, Mohajir dominated Karachi, is under threat with targeted killings, has called for army rule in the country. Otherwise there will be a revolution, he warned. In the fortnight since he made the assertion, the government has appeared more weakkneed from Peshawar to Quetta. Against this backdrop came the Gilani assertion on Thursday in Islamabad that there was no threat to democracy. 

“The army neither intends to come to power, nor will it do so”, the beleaguered Prime Minister said, and added that the army was participating in flood relief activities on the government’s request. So, in his view, ‘those who consider the army and the civil government two separate entities are living in a fool’s paradise’.

Well, it is natural for Gilani to deny ‘army takeover’ talk. For Kayani too there is no need for issuing a clarification. He is secure in his job with an unprecedented three-year extension that has repositioned him as the back seat driver. Anyhow what is so tantalizing about the front seat or driver’s seat?