Integrity Score 135
No Records Found
No Records Found
No Records Found
Looking up the billowing petticoats of the princess dowager with a telescope, a courtier shouts out: “I see the road to Preferment, well fenc’d and water’d.” “There’s the road, thro bushy park,” says another looking upwards, the pun alluding to the royal park at Bushey and to the genitals of the mother of King George III. “I love power,” princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg cries out, as she rides a broomstick. “Let us make the most of this,” responds her court favourite, the prime minister and third earl of Bute, John Stuart. “We are above the vulgar.”
For politicians in Pakistan, the world of eighteenth-century English popular politics might seem strangely familiar. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan has claimed the government’s plotting to defame him with fake gandi-gandi videos. The elderly Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz leader Pervaiz Rashid was targeted through a purportedly leaked video in which the party vice-president is seen recording online sex. And the senator Azam Khan Swati has revealed he was blackmailed with a secretly-filmed explicit video.
Lewd, unashamedly sexist and politically incendiary, the pamphlet about the princess, now housed in the British Museum, was part of a war against the court being waged by the radical—and unscrupulous—politician John Wilkes. Lord Bute had been hand-picked by the crown to end the power of landed oligarchs—and Wilkes hit back with a savage campaign of sexual rumour and innuendo.
Tempting as it is to see the leaked videos as just one more element in the no-holds-barred power struggle among Pakistan’s political élite, the sexual scandals have special significance—just as it had in the time of George III. In regimes built around theological claims, morals have a special place in securing leadership legitimacy. Like armoured vehicles and Kalashnikovs, shame is a weapon.
“Gossip is like a water,” Salman Rushdie wrote in his stellar novel on Pakistan. “It probes surfaces for their weak places, until it finds the breakthrough point.”