The charade that is parliament

Parliament has been gradually becoming an ossified irrelevance virtually since the last election. The latest piece of political chicanery involves the passing of a resolution that says that a person who is ineligible to be elected as a lawmaker is also ineligible to be an office-bearer of a political party. This of course relates to the determination of Nawaz Sharif, a man of indeterminate status these days, to restore himself as the head of the political party that bears his name and presumably at some point also restore himself to the position of Prime Minister from which he was summarily ejected by the apex judiciary.

Parliamentary observers and commentators opine that the resolution is little more than cosmetic, a political gimmick, and that no matter what parliament may do Nawaz Sharif is going to roll back the script and arrive at square one as the head of the PML-N in time for the next election in 2018, and another shot at the prime ministership.

This is by no means as far-fetched as it might sound. Both houses of parliament have already passed the Elections Act of 2017 which rolled out the red carpet for Mr Sharif to again front the PML-N, rendering the disqualification of the Supreme Court on July 28^th a supreme irrelevance, the rule of law having had its cloth cut to fit a single individual. The leader of the opposition — a barrister himself — pointed out that an anomalous situation had arisen whereby a person who was disqualified from being a member of parliament but could still be the head of a political party. Not only that but so could a person of unsound mind or somebody that has given up their citizenship. The law minister wondered how it was that an individual could hijack parliament. How indeed. All this is deeply unedifying, with political behemoths chucking their teddies around the playpen in a display that is gobbled up by the media and sees Pakistan again critically examined in the foreign press. There is a miserable inevitability about events now in train as elective feudalism shapes the future of what has become a faux-democracy.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 13^th, 2017.

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