The country is in disarray! This is what the opposition parties and a treasury member, who is a minister too, explained as the National Assembly began its 28th session on Monday. The helplessness of the numbers-weak and crises-ridden government is, however, understandable as the choices for it are limited and problems enormous. But its slipshod approach to asserting its authority and the obduracy with which it disowns its own actions are indeed alarming, if not downright frightening.
Faisal Saleh Hayat is often precise and does not indulge in petty point scoring and playing to the galleries. He started with a reference to indirectly-elected Finance Minister Dr Hafeez Shaikh’s remarks against politicians and parliamentarians that the “interest groups” had “bribed” them to oppose the imposition of the Reformed General Sales Tax (RGST). If this is true and the minister, one believes, must have tangible evidence to prove it, the government must expose these “black sheep”.
Faisal asked his colleagues to put the finance minister in the dock for insulting elected representatives but his wake-up call went unattended – no one had the gumption to stand up against the allegation the finance minister had leveled against them. Equally disturbing was his concern about the role of the parliament which, he said, appeared to have outsourced its functions to the Supreme Court, as what the parliament had to do was being done by that court.
Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan summed up the events that took place while the National Assembly was not in session. In his usually long sermon, he mostly repeated what he always spoke of in his first speech at the beginning of every session. After listening to him, it clearly appeared that nothing had changed, with the government ostensibly determined to do it all its own way.
He however held the government responsible for the situation in Karachi and implied that with no one owning the operation in the crime-hit city, the government had lost its writ and a ‘state within the state’ was at work.
Nisar hit the government hard for putting Nabil Gabol’s name on the Exit Control List (ECL) while his resignation had not been accepted. Though the prime minister, who replied to most of the issues raised by Faisal and Nisar, left this matter for Nabil to clarify, Nabil “unintentionally” proved Nisar’s point and embarrassed the government for having lost its control over the state affairs saying that his name was “mischievously” put on the ECL by a junior officer.
This is something really serious. Can a junior officer take such action? And if a junior officer had done this, has the prime minister taken any action against this mischief of a “junior officer”? The answer is: No. The prime minister confused the issue further, leaving it for anyone to guess who would have possibly ordered this.
The PPP, if its leadership feels it, was put to shame by PML-N’s Shahid Khaqan Abbasi for disowning former Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar, a close associate of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto.
He died recently. It is a parliamentary tradition that when a former member of the house dies, the house prays for the departed soul. No PPP member thought it fit to inform the house about the former interior minister’s death. Maybe the PPP did not want to annoy the MQM and disowned the man who once was the member of the Bhuttos’ “core team”.
