If a picture is worth a thousand words, being in the moment has to be priceless. There was a general feeling of anticipation among journalists covering the Sindh Assembly session on Monday, what with new electoral alliances, new ministers, and a pre-budget debate to look forward to. The first day had all the classic makings of disappointment, but MQM’s Faisal Subzwari saved my day with a Kodak moment.
Subzwari sits a bench ahead of PML-F legislators Nusrat Sehar Abbasi and Marvi Rashdi. Both women came hyper-charged to the session. A new year had begun for the Assembly, and this enthusiasm was justified. The jiyalas were their usual selves: the session was more of a family gathering for them, friends chitchatting among themselves, trashing any debate of substance, and ensuring that the Ayaz Soomro-version of legal interpretation prevailed.
After meandering through futile proceedings, the session suddenly burst to life as Abbasi rose from her seat to present a resolution honouring Sindh’s iconic scholar Nabi Bux Baloch. PPP’s Anwar Mahar also rose simultaneously to present a similar motion, but Speaker Nisar Khuhro urged him to let Abbasi move her “detailed” resolution. Shazia Marri was not in such accommodating mood, and rose to argue that Abbasi’s detailed piece was in fact plagiarised from a news report printed in an English daily.
Thus began the war of words between Abbasi and Marri, the former taking affront at the latter’s accusations. A little while earlier, Ayaz Soomro had snubbed Abbasi’s protestations on another matter — claiming that she merely wanted to get some projection on a Sindhi-language channel. Rashdi too had been ignored when she presented her adjournment motion on target killings.
Perhaps the two non-PPP MPAs thought that reconciliatory politics would get them far. Nothing doing, was the response from Marri, who waved her cell phone to show the exact text of the news report that Abbasi had copy-pasted from, arguing that making anything plagiarised part of the Assembly record would be heresy. The war soon turned into a competition of who could out-shout the other. Principally shouted versus rhetorically shouted.
And here comes our Kodak moment of the day: Abbasi was yelling and hollering at Marri like a locomotive without a brake and her neighbour, poor Subzwari, was being hit by a cacophony worse than the Fajr azaan of a non-melodious moazzin on a bright and hot Monday morning. Up he stood, hands on his ears and one finger inside his olfactory canal, and into the welcoming sanctuary of the MQM backbenchers.
Thanks to Marri’s policing of plagiarism and Subzwari’s Kodak moment, I left the Assembly with my heart garden-garden. Till tomorrow.