The Backbencher: Strike a pose for the Senate, PPP seems to say, there’s nothing to it

The parliamentary leaders gushed about how the Senate elections were a sign of democracy flourishing in Pakistan.


Saba Imtiaz March 03, 2012

KARACHI:


They strode in with their sunglasses, pearls and matching handbags, posed for the cameras and walked off. It wasn’t a red carpet event that would go on to grace the pages of a Sunday publication with the captions ‘Tinky and friend’. But for the amount of posing that went on at the Sindh Assembly on Friday, it could have been a mini-fashion show.


The real action was on the floor where the MPAs were voting for the Senate elections. A few of the candidates had shown up, including the Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) prominent leader Raza Rabbani, who looked rather hassled because of a pencil strangely stuck, not behind one ear, but under the temple of his spectacles. As if that wasn’t distracting enough, his phone was constantly ringing.

As MPAs filed in and out of Committee Room No. 1, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) Senator and Federal Minister for Ports and Shipping Babar Ghauri offered a prediction: “I don’t think the general elections will happen in October, they will be in 2013.”

Ghauri also told reporters that political parties would start negotiations next week over the deputy chairperson slot in the Senate. “I spoke to Chaudhry Shujaat who said the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) wants to put up a candidate. We will meet next week with them as well as the other parties and the MQM Coordination Committee will make a decision.”

The parliamentary leaders gushed about how the Senate elections were a sign of democracy flourishing in Pakistan and hoped that they would bode well for the next general elections. The newly elected MPA Hasnain Mirza was ambushed by cameras when he met Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Wassan, who succeeded his father to the job.

The PPP-led government has been pronounced on the verge of demise so many times that one has lost track. Analysts, talk show hosts and politicians have often predicted that the government is “about to collapse” but lo and behold, the PPP seemed poised to take home a coveted majority in the upper house of the parliament, the Senate.

“Congratulations, we have won the elections!” proclaimed Agha Siraj Durrani, the local government minister, in the brief Sindh Assembly session on Friday, which was more of a self-congratulatory meeting of parliamentarians given that it ended after a few laudatory speeches.

And among the SUVs that left the assembly on Friday, was a government car that blared the iconic PPP anthem, ‘Dila’n Teer Bija’. It was a soundtrack befitting the day and defiant of the doomsday predictions that have dogged the government.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3rd, 2012.

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