It’s gone wild and there’s no chance of it sobering up as long as party policies are dictated by Ch Nisar Ali Khan. Mian Nawaz Sharif is all ears to such hawks and when he chose to publicly incite rebellion against the government then the likes of Tehmina Daultana and Ahsan Iqbal needed no orders to get unleashed; the crazy duo spearheading the rumpus did everything it could possibly do to disrupt the Finance Minister’s budget speech.
It all got off to a stormy start with the opposition parliamentarians raising slogans against the government on issues like price-hike, financial mismanagement and corruption the moment Dr Hafeez Sheikh took the floor. High drama was witnessed with Tehmina hurling bangles at the finance minister and Ahsan walking up to the rostrum with a roti in his hand, not realising that he’s making mockery of the Punjab government’s biggest fiasco.
The opposition parliamentarians who set the tone for uproar during the Finance Minister’s speech as they did during President Zardari’s address to the joint sitting of parliament must have left many wondering if these politicos can do such acts only when a democratic government is in power, and not during a dictatorship. Public memory needs no trouble recalling that it was the PPP members alone who kept chanting “Go-Musharraf-go” slogans the only time the military dictator had addressed the joint sitting; today’s most vocal voices in the PML(N) had then either kept mum or staged a symbolic protest.
But the League leadership must be happy to see its loyalists deliver the well-scripted performance because what they did was very much in line with the deliberation of the parliamentary party meeting held just ahead of the budget session. Mian Nawaz is in no mood to let the current dispensation function smoothly, this having become evident over the past few weeks when he started demonstrating political brinkmanship. A constant prodding by the party hawks makes him more inflexible in his dealing with the PPP leadership.
The rejection of the commission constituted by the federal government to investigate the Abbottabad incident that had plunged the country into worldwide humiliation is a case in point. There’s no doubt that this time around the blame doesn’t entirely lie with the League leadership. It took the government over two weeks since the passage of a unanimous resolution by the joint sitting of parliament to form a commission to probe the incident. It became controversial the moment it was announced. That the whole exercise was carried out in haste can be gauged from the fact that one of its members refused to be part of the commission, ostensibly because he had not been consulted.
And once this happened there’s no-holds-barred. The next in the line of attack was SCBA President Asma Jehangir who challenged legality of the commission on the ground that Justice Javaid Iqbal had been appointed its head without having taken the Chief Justice into confidence. You can’t help but take Baber Awan’s declaration that all formalities had been fulfilled before the announcement of the commission with a pinch of salt. For when Mr Awan is telling the truth, he doesn’t usually get involved in so many ifs and buts!
Perhaps the government was aware of the advantage of forming such a commission. It could postpone political protest to the point of attrition and also help whitewash failures and criminal negligence of its intelligence apparatus as witnessed in Abbottabad bombing and the Mehran base attack. Here it must have miscalculated opposition’s reaction. The time it had spent finalising the names of the members of the enquiry commission was spent by the PML hawks keeping the cauldron hot. They sounded enraged. Not only did they continue attacking the armed forces and the ISI for their massive failures but also incited the public against the government for finalizing new rules of engagement with the American government for carrying out operation against militants in the restive tribal region.
There’s no doubt that the PML(N) leadership was giving expression to public anger by constantly mounting pressure on the federal government and military high command already shaken by the two incidents which have dealt a deadly blow to the national security. But at the same time the League is also trying to get some mileage out of these issues when grappling with the erosion of its votebank caused by its own bad governance in Punjab.
This having been said, the League leadership while indulging in political point scoring should not lose sight of the fact that a week down the line it may encounter even worse situation at the hands of the combined opposition in the Punjab Assembly. Falling short of simple majority in a 372-member House with the turncoats equally disenchanted, the provincial budget’s passage can turn out to be an uphill task.
The writer is Executive Editor, Pakistan Today