The rumble in the political playpen

The air is thick with flying teddies in the political playpen. Rattles and cuddly toys are hurled right and left. Yes, the cream of Pakistani politics is having one of its periodic regressions to infancy and abandoned, for now, the always-lukewarm experiment with parliamentary democracy. The trigger for all this rambunctiousness is the Panama Papers, which look set to provide endless fun in the playpen for months to come. The aforesaid papers raise any number of questions for the ruling family (let us not delude ourselves, Pakistan is an extension of the family business so far as the Sharifs are concerned, the politics is something of a distraction), which are unlikely to be answered this side of hell freezing over.

Rather than rising above the fray, the prime minister has waded in along with members of his cabinet. Government ministers have been less than charitable about the Shaukat Khanum hospital, a charitable institution founded by Imran Khan, the leader of the PTI. For its part, the PTI has maintained a discreet silence about the fact that one of its own starlets, Jahangir Tareen, is a man with a clutch of offshore companies himself, an exercise in shoddy hypocrisy if ever there was one. The also-ran in the bust-up in the nursery is the PPP, but it is not above throwing the soft furnishings around either. Nobody has bothered to mention the other 200-odd Pakistanis also squirreling away their assets offshore.

Any pretence of political maturity has been abandoned pro tem in favour of a sterile exercise in political point-scoring played out nightly on TV chat shows where a revolving cast of talking heads blather at one another to no great effect. The PML-N could have wrapped itself in the cloak of dignity and the prime minister at an individual level could have made a greater show of transparency rather than creating the cloak of invisibility that was the proposed catch-all inquiry that nobody with an ounce of prescience was going to sign up for. Now is the summer of our discontent, the ‘adulting’ button on the playpen set to ‘paused’.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3^rd, 2016.

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