Cheap shots and the yearning to recreate the Simpson trial

Since 1985, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has remained one of my favourite parliamentarians.

This energetic Rajput of clean reputation from the Salt Range is blessed with a ruthlessly clear head. He would speak in public or to the media, just to deliver a well-thought-out message. In this assembly, however, I am getting to know a Chaudhry Nisar, who mostly behaves in an amateur manner.

No doubt, a real estate tycoon is not friendly with him these days. There have also been alleged attempts to “register 30,000 new voters” in a constituency in Rawalpindi which Nisar had won in 2002 and 2008 elections.

Of course, if such things happened, they could not have been done without the support of Rehman Malik. Still, it is below Nisar’s stature to keep talking about a real or imagined wrong of such a petty nature. Yet he has kept speaking about it since last week, derisively taking on NADRA and its “real manipulator,” Asif Ali Zardari.

Taking advantage of Chaudhry Nisar’s absence, Rehman Malik tried some damage control on Tuesday, when he thundered that his party loyalists would not tolerate “ridiculing of our president.”

The matter, which should have been buried there, was taken up again by Nisar after the question-hour. Without naming the interior minister, he called him “the jack-of-all-trades-type crony of Zardari”: PML-N backbenchers chanted “down with Zardari Raj,” and “all friends of Zardari are traitors” in his support.

After the verbal lynching of the president and his interior minister, Nisar moved on to his pet theme: “stopping drone attacks on our sovereign territory”. Since the government seemed to be helpless to do anything about it, he left the house in “disgust”. PML-N benches mindlessly kept shouting slogans for some time before staging a token walk-out.

Syed Khurshid Shah tried to remind Nisar a few things as he tried to calm his own party’s lawmakers. In a cool manner, he recalled that PML-N leaders, who currently appeared to be rabidly anti-US, had rushed to Washington in July 1999 in a desperate bid to get then President Clinton’s help in extricating themselves from the crisis generated by the Kargil conflict.

I left the assembly as I could no longer bear this cheap point scoring. Besides, I had to meet this column’s deadline.

Throughout the Wednesday sitting, most of my younger colleagues, especially those working for the ‘breaking-news-driven’ electronic media, were anxiously seeking some “exclusive” time with key ministers. The idea was to find out specifics of the ‘five questions’ reportedly approved by the federal cabinet in a ‘special meeting’ Wednesday morning. Babar Awan is supposed to put those questions before the Supreme Court.

A week before the reference was submitted before the Supreme Court, a permanent fly on the walls of the president’s office in Islamabad could not elude me at a social gathering. When I was able to manoeuvre the fly into a corner, I grilled it about why Zardari was so adamant to force the Supreme Court to take a position on what had happened to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979.

Why does he really need this ‘diversion’?

The fly, visibly suppressing anger, recounted in an emotionally crackling voice: “The president has been telling us that for generations born since the 1980s, Bhutto has become irrelevant. He simply wants the youth to fathom the epical dimensions of his personality and show blunders committed by Zia and his junta during the trial and eventual hanging. Yet the question remained: how to go about it?

“Somewhere in mid-February this year came the idea of requesting the Supreme Court to revisit Bhutto’s trial via a presidential reference. Babar Awan was to go through the case’s record.”

The fly insisted that Awan held several late night meetings with President Zardari. “Often,” the fly said, “he was (seen) sobbing while discussing some heart-rending moments of the Bhutto trial.”

No matter what Awan said, Zardari, I was told, was not that interested in just recasting ‘history’: his objective was to create the sort of impact that the live coverage of Simpson trial once created for viewers across the US in the mid-1990s.

“Awan was confident that he could manoeuvre it, provided he was allowed to plead the case himself,” the fly told me.

We still have to see whether he succeeds in getting permission for the live coverage of, as Awan calls it, “the mother of all cases”.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 21^st, 2011.