Meet Jack, from Sialkot - and trust her

Journalists are supposed to be jacks of all trades and masters of none. After becoming the chief ‘spin master’ of Zardari-Gilani government, Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan is also demonstrating her command over multiple issues of governance.

With less than 50 members attending the session, the National Assembly started its Friday sitting at 10:45am . Some members protested over the absence of any response from any minister on questions regarding the status of foreign direct investment in the country.

Endorsing their protest, Faisal Karim Kundi, the deputy speaker, pointed out that members who had posed questions were mostly missing when relevant ministers attended the assembly session.

After taking her seat, Dr Awan conveyed her readiness to take on questions on foreign investment – and members had a lot of them.

Since returning to this assembly in 2008, this physician from Sialkot has always been eager to participate in popular TV talk shows. She ensured good ratings by her very own ‘telling-it-in-your-face’ style and thick-skinned defence of her party and its leader. No wonder, the soft-spoken and friend-to-all Kaira had to vacate the ministry of thought control for her in the end.

Contrary to her image of an aggressive hawk, Dr Awan repeatedly told lawmakers that foreign investment was “pouring” into the country. This was happening, despite the global economic meltdown and the terrorism-related profile of this country.

Instead of feeling dejected by “speculation-driven” reports appearing in print and electronic media, public representatives should “trust” the “fact-based” answers that she was giving them. Dollars were even coming for “wind-meels” and may come to make the government-run industries, like the Steel Mills and PIA, profitable once “we are through with their restructurisation.”

Rehman Malik, who is also from Sialkot, was in an equally persuasive mood, telling the house that scanners were actually preventing terrorist attacks. Our “Chinese brothers and sisters” provided two of them, without charging a penny, to test their worth. This motivated the government to buy more than 20 such scanners at a “reasonable price.” One has to disregard rules such as open bidding and transparent purchasing while protecting innocent citizens from heartless Taliban, “who must be called traitors”, as the minister asserted.

Once, he also blamed Americans, although implicitly, for not being “real friends”, accusing them of not sharing “information when terrorists crossed into our territory from Afghanistan”.

Although his own party members did not appear to be moved by his rhetoric, MQM members were often found bolstering the interior minister’s assertive statements with spirited desk thumping.

Legislators were to discuss the presidential address to a joint sitting of the parliament, but Nawab Talpur pleaded to speak on a point-of-order. Kundi could not say no to this once-powerful PPP veteran.

Talpur claimed that his son, who was elected as a lawmaker on a Sindh assembly seat from Umerkot, had been implicated in a false murder case, simply for annoying a DCO during a district development meeting.

The DPO concerned, Talpur said, had cleared him after the initial probe, but he (the DCO) was “instantly” transferred, and the new DPO was now adamant to arrest his son in the same case. Sounding hurt and helpless, Nawab Talpur told the house that he would soon be rushing to his hometown to “personally present my son to the police, while sincerely hoping that it would heal the wounded pride of a trigger-happy bureaucrat”.

As a PPP leader since 1970, he claimed to have become too used to the punitive whims of a government, “but you feel sad for being a victim of them when your own party is in the government. And this happens to be the same government that goes an extra mile to appease the old opponents of the PPP.”

Abdul Ghani Talpur, another PPP member from Sindh, stood up to express solidarity with him. Some ruling party members from Punjab also expressed sympathy. The prime minister remained too busy gleefully signing papers presented to him by a crowd surrounding his bench. Kundi requested the interior minister to do something for Talpur, and Rehman Malik casually promised to help him. How can Rehman Malik help Nawab Talpur, when even the Sindh chief minister presumably acted oblivious to what was happening to a PPP member of the provincial assembly?

Is he the Viceroy of Sindh?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 16^th,  2011.