A visit to the parliament, that aggregation of our teeming millions, housed in two halls across each other in a building in Islamabad can be awe-inspiring. Nothing can inspire a feeling of national cohesion more than seeing the vast diversity in the representatives of the people, despite their shenanigans. Yet it is this very august body that has refused, in the past, to respect itself and display some gumption when others cast aspersions on it.
Faisal Saleh Hayat, who leads the PML(Q)s parliamentary body in the NA, expressed on the floor of the house how seriously offended he was at the finance ministers recent statements in Karachi, where the latter claimed special interest groups had bribed parliamentarians to take a position against the reformed GST bill. Now Mr Hayats and his ilk might have populist and half-baked arguments against the RGST bill; and the finance ministers arguments in favour of the RGST would make sense to economists and non-economists alike. But Mr Hafeez Sheikh should have avoided making such scandalous allegations against sitting parliamentarians. But that was not all that irked the PML(Q) leader. The scrapping of parliamentary bodies, he said, is slowly making the parliament a redundant body, forcing people to knock on the judiciarys door. He was not way off the mark. Cases like the Hajj corruption, RPPs, breaches in the dykes were taken care of not by the parliament (or even the executive government) but by the apex court.
Protecting the parliament and showing institutional activism is not just about making sure no one badmouths its members without principles but also about making sure the body does not cede its space in issues of governance by not working enough. Similarly, other institutions, like the judiciary, for instance, should stay well within its constitutionally mandated role. The lawyers movement that was instrumental in reinstating the judiciary started their struggle against a dictator in 2007. The parliament had started the same in 2002.
