Guile behind Zardari’s blossming friendship with the Chaudhries

Our rudderless government failed to furnish any tangible legislative agenda for this session of the national assembly and throughout its sittings, public representatives kept desperately looking for “urgent issues of public interest” to deliver bombastic but senseless speeches.

I was thus not surprised when Thursday morning all of them instantly decided to suspend the question hour to initiate hypocritical chest-beating over the infernal monster that had gulped a garment factory with hundreds of its workers in Karachi the other day.

After speeches and speeches, the house in the end demanded through a resolution, passed by consensus, that both the governments of Sindh and Punjab should establish judicial commissions to find out reasons behind the growing incidents of fire-triggered tragedies in various factories of these provinces.

The buck, in short, was conveniently passed on to the judiciary and still many of our legislators keep complaining that judges of the superior courts were behaving hyperactively intrusive.

Maulana Ismatullah had other thoughts, however. He had come to the national assembly from Balochistan on a JUI-F ticket. After a while, though, he discovered that Maulana Fazlur Rehman was not practising and promoting the pious politics. He felt as if compelled to form his own faction that he named “ideological.” Two weeks ago, the same faction held a convention in a Pushtun-dominated district of Balochistan. A huge crowd of our own Taliban reached there in long caravans of latest model Land Cruisers.

After getting the mike in the national assembly Thursday morning, this Mullah with a black turban told the house with a straight face that Pakistan was condemned to suffer disaster after disaster, simply for the reason that its people had “betrayed Allah.” More than sixty years ago, he recalled, “we promised to God that we will enforce Shariah in this country of Muslims. We didn’t fulfill the said promise and it had invoked God’s fury.” With absolute confidence of a righteous Mullah, Ismatullah ensured the house, “tragedies would instantly cease happening in Pakistan, only if we implemented 6000-plus recommendations that were made by the Council of Islamic Ideology.” Riaz Fatyana was chairing the sitting when Ismatullah delivered his sermon. Often the chair begged him to finish, but the Maulana refused to oblige. “I am not talking about politics. My sole objective is to make you understand that how and why Allah is angry with us. You cannot stop me from conveying the divine message. You had better listen to me attentively, if interested in protecting Pakistan and its people.” He rather told the chair in a reprimanding tone.

Hardly a member cared to recall and confess during speechmaking on the Karachi tragedy that life was turning increasingly dangerous and accident-prone in our metropolitan cities; primarily due to the absence of effective city governments. Factories all across the country are still being ‘monitored’ on models and patterns which were developed and devised way back in 1934. Until today, we could not inject even one amendment in The Factory Act of yore; forget updating it with a massive revamp. Factories continue to proliferate in crowded localities. Petty ‘inspectors’ take no time to issue clearance certificates for them, even without visiting sites with clearly written manuals in their hands. Every business in this country survives and thrives without any security checks. Disasters make us moan and then we forget.

Some optimists that I met in parliament house Thursday thought otherwise, though. They believed that in spite of neglecting the issue of city governments since 2008 for unexplained reasons, the PPP and the MQM were now determined to facilitate their restoration by holding local bodies’ elections in Sindh. It is obvious that the “prime stakeholders” of the power pie in Sindh have decided to install these governments with a cunningly opportunist intent of consolidating their base before holding of the next election. But that should not blind us to positive possibilities of establishing such governments in metropolitan cities.

Two PML-N members privately confessed to me that “inevitable-looking resurrection of local governments in Sindh” will increase pressure for doing the same in Punjab and “Shahbaz Sharif starts shivering in panic, if you discuss this idea with him.” The PML-N backbenchers insist that the Chief Minister of Punjab does not resent the idea of restoring local governments only to continue with hands-on ‘governance’ by commanding and controlling via micromanagement. His real fear is that restoration of city governments will help revive the PML-Q. Already, three big names of rural and local “electables” from Central Punjab had returned under wings of the Chaudhrys of.

Gujrat and many others are waiting. After listening to these PML-N MNAs, I can now understand as to why Asif Ali Zardari is feeling so excited about cultivating “lifelong friendship with Chaudhrys” these days.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14^th, 2012.