Procrastination stays the byword
Syed Khurshid Shah, the PPP’s point man in the NA, has raised the most pertinent question. A month and a half has gone by since the APC unanimously handed the government the authority to initiate dialogue with the Taliban or to take coercive steps to eliminate terrorism. “The government has failed to take [the] parliament and the nation into confidence on steps taken in either of the two directions,” says Shah. Shah is not alone in voicing his discontent: the PTI’s captain Imran Khan and the JUI-F supremo Maulana Fazlur Rehman have been creating their own cacophony of noise over the government’s foot-dragging on the much-trumpeted dialogue. But Shah’s voice carries weight, for in the NA he happens to be the leader of the opposition – an office that the PTI craves for despite its lack of numbers.
Out of power for nearly a decade and a half at the centre, the PML-N it seems has lost that most important quotient in governance: finding the right decision on the go. Owing to its procrastination it is attracting the flak from many a critic. It took nearly 90 days to hold the APC, and in another 45 it apparently made no move to challenge the relentlessly devastating menace of terror. The mandate to tackle it head on by its own lights was bestowed on it by the electorate. Yet it kept on passing the buck in the name of trying to find the euphemistic consensus. Well, the elusive consensus was found – and a palatable one at that too, in consonance not just with the PML-N’s stated stance but the entire right’s, from the far to the close to the centre varieties included. And yet after nearly five months in the saddle, Sartaj Aziz, the PM’s adviser on foreign affairs, has finally ‘indicated’ that talks might commence in the next few days. This is taking vacillation to higher-art-form levels.
And now the PM has written to other parties in the parliament seeking support to turn the controversial Protection of Pakistan Ordinance 2013 into an act of parliament. The PPP has rejected out of hand the ordinance that gives extraordinary powers to the law-enforcing agencies to curb terrorism, dubbing it as an assault on the fundamental rights. There is little chance that it would find the consensus the PM is seeking unless the ordinance in its own life span first makes a profound impact on perpetrators of terror without, as is the fear, getting misused to hound the ordinary citizen.
