In Opposition — or not

The role of the parliamentary Opposition has come under the scrutiny of Imran Khan, a man who is rarely sighted in the Lower House. He said it was the job of the Opposition ‘to make accusations’ and for the government to prove them wrong. In this instance Mr Khan is correct in broad terms but his correctness is undermined by the ground realities. For an opposition party to be effective in parliamentary terms then that party has to be present in parliament and raise questions (not accusations) that it is for the government benches to answer either via the Prime Minister or through members of his cabinet. This activity is known as ‘parliamentary debate’ and Pakistan suffers from a chronic deficit of it. It would appear that Mr Khan is conflating the role of the courts and parliament which are very different. Parliament makes the law, the judiciary dispenses it. The Panama Papers affair has had considerably more time in the courts than in parliament, though it is parliamentary proceedings that may be the crux of the case.

On Wednesday the Honourable Justices got somewhat vexed at the media and its propensity to bring daily, indeed hourly, judgment that is both extra-judicial and supra-parliamentary and more aimed at gathering viewers than voters — to say nothing of the media tendency to turn the Supreme Court into an extension of a TV studio. Quite where a parliamentary Opposition fits into the melange is increasingly unclear as parliament itself is something of a sideshow rather than the cockpit. Perhaps once the case is concluded Mr Khan and his fellow members of the National Assembly would care to return to the house and go about the business of being parliamentarians.

With conflicts of interest now having risen to the top of the legal broth in court, and the Bench mulling the possibility of summoning members of the Sharif family if they are found to have made contradictory statements recently or historically, there remains much ground to cover. A Prime Minister in the witness box? Under oath? Or perhaps the Leader of the Opposition.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 6^th, 2017.

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