Does the PPP have a position on anything anymore?

With the history of a street-hardened activist, Khawaja Saad Rafique is an established PML-N hawk. Whenever they feel the need to take on the PPP, PML-N leaders habitually turn to him. No wonder reporters were ready for taking copious notes when he took the mike Thursday morning.

The youthful MNA from Lahore did try to provoke the PPP back-benchers while holding their party founder, ZAB, responsible for the break-up of Pakistan in 1971. He continued taunting while recalling Bhutto’s emergence on the political scene under the patronising wings of the first military dictator, General Ayub.

However, the PPP MNAs were just not pushed. None of them bothered to react even when he clearly stated, “Yes, we [the PML-N] do recognise Ms Benazir Bhutto as a Shaheed, but the same can’t be said about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.”

The cold indifference that the PPP benches maintained regarding Saad’s diatribe against their party founder made me think.

During the prime ministerial presence in the House, Ms Sherry Rehman appeared to be discussing some issue with Gilani, in a somewhat agitated manner. After talking to him, she moved to sit next to Rehman Malik, apparently to follow up the same issue.

Despite not being able to talk to her, I can safely guess that Sherry was disturbed because the government had not moved for Ms Mukhtaran Mai. Except one, all persons accused of gang raping her were acquitted by the Supreme Court early last week. Women rights activists felt let down by the decision and vocally demanded that a review of the acquittal should be sought. With pretensions of being women-friendly, the PPP-led government should rather apply for the review itself via the Attorney General. Sherry had diligently communicated the demand to Gilani when he came to attend an assembly sitting.

Only after getting a firm commitment from him, could Sherry take the liberty of informing on camera that her party government might seek the review of Mukhtaran’s case. She must have been feeling let down, for it is yet to happen. Between you, me and the lamp post, I have serious doubts that Gilani would move on that count.

After all, he is the same Prime Minister who repeatedly disowned the position that Salman Taseer took on Aasia Bibi. As a vocal Governor of Punjab, Taseer dared to seek the release of Aasia and kept demanding that laws related to blasphemy needed corrective revisiting.

“This is not the party policy,” the Prime Minister told me categorically, when I came to Salman Taseer’s position during a live question-answer session on television. His government also hesitated to take an aggressive position when it came to deal with causes and consequences of Taseer’s brutal murder in a high end market of Islamabad. Gilani’s posturing and conduct during the heat of controversy that culminated in Taseer’s murder, forces me to suspect that he would not press his Attorney General to seek a review of Mukhtaran’s case from the Supreme Court. Sherry can still try her luck, though. Meanwhile, she should also try to get a clear answer from her party leaders to the question: What is the PPP position on Mukhtaran’s case?

We surely are getting conflicting signals on this issue. If Sherry is working overtime to convince the Prime Minister that he should seek a review from the Supreme Court, a high profile MNA from her own party, Jamshed Dasti, continues to repeatedly confront Ms Mukhtaran in live TV shows.

With a poker face, he keeps insisting that she had “invented the story of her gang rape.” The “donor-funded NGOs owned it up greedily and spread it to the world to malign the image of Pakistan and Islam.”

Neither the President nor the PMhas so far bothered to correct him with a shut-up call. After such obvious indifference to delirious assertions by Jamshed Dasti, only an incurably naïve person should still accept the “liberal and women-friendly” label for the PPP.



Published in The Express Tribune, April 29^th, 2011.