Lost opportunities and credibility deficit

ISLAMABAD:

Both houses of parliament are working overtime, rushing through speechmaking on budgetary proposals. Sitting in either of the houses of parliament, you hardly feel that any of our public representatives has even glanced through the massive budgetary documents.

On Friday, most journalists were trying to secure some credible protection for two of their colleagues from Sindh – a reporter and a cameraperson – who were able to record the ghastly event of the killing of a young man in Karachi by a number of Rangers personnel on Wednesday.

The recording had put the life of the makers of this footage in deep danger. Fearing for their life after being abandoned by their ‘mother network’, they landed in Islamabad Friday morning to avoid the possibility of being listed as ‘missing in action’. No weighty minister was around to take up their cause. Finally, the group of panicky journalists spotted Dr Babar Awan. The former law minister and a darling of President Zardari these days, Awan promised to report our anxiety in the Senate. He facilitated the Senate chairman to clearly instruct the government to furnish a fool-proof security to the two journalists. It was just fortuitous that at that very moment Rehman Malik also walked in and he instantly took the two under his wings. Although why he sneaked via a back door is a different matter altogether.

Journalists suspected that he did not want the harassed journalists to undergo the pressures of ‘live television’ after enduring the recording of the brutal killing. They were wrong.  Malik did not want to speak on camera for sure. But the subject he wanted to evade was a different one.

The Chief Justice of Pakistan had taken a suo motu notice of the Karachi killing. Friday morning he asked the attorney-general and the secretary general to inform the Supreme Court, by 12:30, what ‘disciplinary action’ the government had taken against personnel apparently responsible for the gory scene in Karachi. Both the prime minister and the interior minister found themselves in a catch-22 mess after the said order. A well-drafted statement, issued after the corps commanders’ meeting on Thursday had clearly shown that the praetorian regulators of our state and its political scene were not feeling OK with post-Osama despondency.

While the troika was still busy in finding means to alleviate ‘their concerns’, surfaced the brute killing of a young man in Karachi.

And one more time, the Chief Justice triumphantly walked into a vacuum, appearing to be delivering justice. To the utter disappointment of most ruling party legislators, he managed to have appeared as if he was the only person fixing things. .

While talking to me in their chambers, three ministers shared their thoughts over ‘the missed opportunity’. One of the ministers with acknowledged grasp over Machiavellian games sounded doubly depressed on this count. He was convinced that the Zardari-Gilani government was fast losing its credibility and relevance by “slavishly surrendering the right to rule”.





Published in The Express Tribune, June 11th, 2011.