Don’t bet on anything
Leader of the Opposition Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has long tried his hand at fruity sound bites but despite being colourful on occasions few have stuck in memory for their chutzpah.
However, his take on the election of Raja Pervaiz Ashraf as prime minister should find a mention in the lexicon of sarcasm.
Using the much trumpeted slogan — Democracy is the best revenge — that the ruling Pakistan People’s Party has made all its own to describe its heroic triumphs — even if aborted/short-lived — over military dictatorship, Khan instead employed it to underscore Ashraf’s unfancied rise to the top.
He said in picking Ashraf, President Asif Zardari had avenged the Pakistani nation.
Admittedly, disbelief at the turnaround is widespread. Ashraf remains one of the most controversial figures in the party, not in the least for his bombast in 2009, when he claimed he would rid the country of power load-shedding by December of that year.
Three years on, Pakistan is facing the worst energy crisis of its more than six-decade history that threatens to play snakes, not ladders, with the chances of PPP’s re-election in the near future.
Ashraf’s claims prompted his recently disqualified predecessor and then-prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to publicly wheedle him not to give timelines.
The unfulfilled promise apart, he was indicted by the Supreme Court only last March for pursuing a controversial Rental Power Plant (RPP) project that cost Pakistan a fortune — and him an alleged windfall — but was still unhelpful in any meaningful way to address the issue.
It earned him the now infamous sobriquet of ‘Raja Rental’, which continues to reverberate — a recent example of which was the lead display in a pronouncedly sober English broadsheet, which held back a six-decade plus legacy of abstemious journalism to use the same description!
The apex court in its 90-page verdict declared all the RPP deals ‘non-transparent, illegal and void ab initio’. It also directed the National Accountability Bureau to proceed against all government functionaries involved in the scam, including the ministers for water and power during whose tenure the RPPs were approved or set up.
Ashraf, 61, who remained minister for nearly three years, was one of them during the period under review. He was subsequently, interrogated for three hours at the Accountability Bureau for his alleged role in the deal only two months ago.
Earlier, his fellow minister Faisal Saleh Hayat, stunned the PPP government by going to the Supreme Court with purported evidence of Ashraf’s involvement in the controversial deal. This even prompted legal action from him, and amid much rancour, Ashraf lost his ministry (Apparently, Hayat loves the stunner’s job so much he somersaulted to vote for Ashraf in last week’s election of the new PM).
It wasn’t long before Ashraf was rewarded — something of a pattern in the PPP lately — and handed the portfolio of information and technology, clearly not one of his fortes.
Against this backdrop, the intriguing choice of Ashraf as prime minister has raised many eyebrows. Few, at this point in time, have been able to resolve the puzzle except to agree that it is consistent with President Asif Zardari’s mien to take his detractors by surprise and come up with loaded stimuli-response actions.
However, the likely objective could be that the PPP would continue to defy the Supreme Court’s order to write to the Swiss authorities to reopen corruption cases against the president — for which Yousaf Raza Gilani lost his job early this week. For this, it is necessary to have a pliant man in place ready to sacrifice the top office like his predecessor.
A hint in this direction was dropped by Ashraf himself last week in his maiden speech as prime minister on the floor of the House, when he said he was honoured to be chosen for the seat of “martyrs” — referring to the father-daughter duo of prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali and Benazir Bhutto, who were hanged and assassinated respectively under the watch of military dictators.
Unmissable was the import of President Zardari’s brief address after the swearing-in ceremony where he took a swipe at “detractors of democracy” before generously eulogising the “honourable” Yousaf Raza Gilani for “protecting the supremacy of parliament and upholding the constitution”.
The just ousted premier was in attendance when the president emphatically, concluded that history was the “ultimate court” and it will remember Gilani for his sacrifices. Everyone rose from their seats to give the former premier a standing ovation.
However, the vexing question still remains: why pick the much despised Ashraf?
The jury is still out on whether this is another one in a series of masterstrokes from President Zardari — the prevailing view is that it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy to earn “martyrdom” ahead of the forthcoming elections for which the party has little to sell otherwise.
But the Pakistani power matrix is as much of an enigma as it is a thriller. The only sane advice on offer right now is — don’t bet on anything.
The writer is a former newspaper editor based in Islamabad and can be reached at [email protected]
