General Beg at it again

ISLAMABAD:

The PML-N-dominated opposition had forced a National Assembly session on the government to discuss the perennial and increasingly violent chaos in Karachi. Not a word on it was, however, heard on the last sitting of this session on Friday.

The initial 30-plus minutes were consumed by a passionate speech, delivered by Anjum Aqeel. This rag to riches real estate tycoon was elected from mostly rural segments of Islamabad on a PML-N ticket.

The white-collar-crime busting outfits of the federal government accuse Aqeel of amassing a staggering heap of Rs6 billion-plus in the name of buying and selling land for a housing scheme of the National Police Foundation. Despite the loudly shouted accusations, no formal charges have yet been brought against him.

The Islamabad police needed his arrest for another case, where an individual had blamed him for fraud in a land deal. If you can trust the print and electronic media, diehard cronies resisted the arrest of Aqeel by aerial shooting and physical brawls, when the police moved to get him.

Whatever the truth, Nawaz Sharif asked him to surrender in the end and he is in the cage these days. A detained legislator savours the privilege of attending the assembly proceedings on the speaker’s order. Aqeel invoked the same and went on telling his side of the story in the house on Friday.

This scribe is in no position to judge him. But legislators on the two sides of the aisle seemingly judged him innocent as cutting across the party divide most of them expressed solidarity with Aqeel with spirited desk thumping.

As an alert defender of the PML-N, Khawaja Saad Rafique, was quick in comprehending the kind of message Aqeel was conveying through his passionate speech. So without losing a minute he took the mike after Aqeel to pronounce that the PML-N had total faith in the independent judiciary of these days. Nawaz Sharif had asked Aqeel to explain his conduct through an appropriate show cause notice. The membership of those PML-N activists, apparently found in violently resisting the arrest of Aqeel, had been suspended as well.

While Saad Rafique displayed an admirable presence of mind to protect and project a ‘politically correct and principled’ image of his party, Shah Mehmood Qureshi got the mike on a point of order to blast the ‘misleading figure-fudging,’ resorted to by finance wizards working for his party, the PPP.

Qureshi had once worked as the finance minister of Punjab under the patronising wings of Nawaz Sharif. He sounded lethally credible while claiming that the government furnished ‘wrong and misleading figures’ related to fiscal deficit and revenue collection. He strongly believed that the State Bank governor resigned because he could not manage the blowback threatened by printing more money. The auditor-general opted to go for early retirement for the same reason and ‘figure-fudging’ had also forced the chief economist to resign from his post.

Like an accomplished performer, Qureshi employed a theatrical combination of stresses and pauses to beseech members from both sides of the house ‘to join hands’. The former governor State Bank, auditor-general and the chief economist should be summoned before an ‘all-party committee of the National Assembly’ to tell the whole story of the presumed ‘figure-fudging.’

Qureshi is not a novice to parliamentary practices. He needed no tutor to present his case in a more appropriate manner. Why, for example, before standing in the house on Friday, he did no homework? If he was so committed to mobilising legislators on a non-partisan basis against the sly doctoring of figures by the government’s finance wizards, Qureshi should have moved against it through a formally put privileges’ motion, signed by a few MNAs ‘from all the parties’. He obviously was just not interested in that. His sole objective was to embarrass the Zardari-Gilani government with anecdotal mention of its criminal slip-ups. The brief but dramatically potent speech that he delivered should be viewed in the context of a fast building scenario, imagined for the days to come.

General Aslam Beg, a former Army chief, is known more for scheming and conspiring against elected governments than any battles he should have waged against the enemies of Pakistan. He seems to be at it again. The former chief of Jamaat-e-Islami, Qazi Hussain Ahmad is now into ‘think-tanking.’ Over the weekend, he held the inaugural session of his forum. Beg had stunned the participants there by passionately beseeching the incumbent Army chief General Kayani, “to act and protect Pakistan from total ruin.” Presenting his case in the assembly, Qureshi also joined the chorus that seeks a ‘corrective intervention’ from non-parliamentary cleaners of our political system.



Published in The Express Tribune, July 23^rd, 2011.