Cut motions and defence ministry — more noise and chaos in the offing

ISLAMABAD: As I was leaving the parliament building on Monday evening I saw Senator Babar Awan rushing out of the upper house and pacing up and down the parliamentary lobbies. “He is looking for the law secretary,” a colleague whispered in my ears. He is no more the law minister but the government still asks him to deliver when caught in dire straits, my colleague added. It was but obvious that his talent was urgently required to suggest steps that could appease both opposition in the lower house and the Supreme Court on a ticklish issue.

Violating established parliamentary traditions, PML-N hawk Khawaja Saad Rafique forced the speaker to let him put a point of order, immediately after recitation from the Holy Quran. In his peculiar style of a street fighter, Saad asked why DG Rangers, Sindh, whose picket had brutally killed a young man in Karachi, has not yet been transferred despite a ruling to the effect by the chief justice.

The Sindh government had announced that it would appeal against the CJ’s orders but it did not. The buck was passed on to the federal government, presumably because the interior ministry is the real regulator of Rangers’ postings and transfers. The interior minister did not seem in a hurry to take a decision.

The soft-spoken Fehmida Mirza felt helpless to make the opposition understand that issues through points of order could only be aired after the question hour. That compelled the prime minister to launch Syed Khurshid Shah to pacify the opposition. Shah Sahib is an acknowledged manipulator. His humility is killing and he always acts as if going an extra mile to accommodate the opposition.

But the fact is DG Ranger, Sindh could only be transferred by the interior minister and Senator Rehman Malik takes directions from nobody, especially those considered as ‘Gilani’s cronies’ in the cabinet. Without the authority to commit on the matter, Shah could only deliver a yawn-inducing lecture on parliamentary etiquettes. When it failed to take off, Shah Sahib switched to point-scoring. He laboured hard to remind the opposition that the Pakistan Peoples Party had already been submitting itself to courts’ verdicts, even if they were often clearly biased. The prime minister also helped him by supplying him with hastily jotted down points. That didn’t work as well. The PML-N walked out in protest and Shah Sahib was sent by the speaker to bring them back. Eventually, the PML-N legislators returned to the house and Awan’s frantic search for the law secretary clearly indicated that the government brought them back with firm assurance of moving on the DG Rangers’ issue.

Even after transferring the DG Rangers, however, I don’t think the government would be able to get the PML-N back into ‘friendly opposition’ mode as the June 30 deadline given by Nawaz Sharif for setting up an ‘independent commission’ to probe the Abbottabad episode is only two weeks away and the ruling coalition does not seem to have made up its mind so far one way or the other. And then what about another crisis, that is about to begin, probably from Tuesday evening?

From today the National Assembly would begin considering cut motions. Through these cut motions public representatives weigh performance of a particular ministry against allocations demanded. The government justifiably fears that the opposition would use the occasion to discuss in real depth the defence ministry’s demands. And in order to prevent the debate turning into an acrimonious talk show, the government has evolved a strategy. Since Friday evening, the sweet-talking Syed from Sukkur, Khurshid Shah has put this strategy to work by holding a series of lengthy meetings with various PML-N leaders.

With folded hands and voice dripping with earnestness Syed Khurshid Shah has been pleading with the PML-N stalwarts that “only three to four speeches, that too brief and not very harsh” should be delivered on cut motions related to the ministry of defence. When the opposition legislators refuse to oblige, Shah Sahib switches to a gloomy mode and with ominous pauses and sighs starts recollecting the events throughout the 1990s.

He keeps beseeching the PML-N legislators to carefully read and fathom ‘the message,’ wrapped in a press release issued at the end of a corps commanders’ meeting in Rawalpindi last Thursday, but to no avail so far.  So, we are all set to witness more chaos and noise in the national assembly this week, as opposition members mount a scathing scrutiny of things our praetorian masters do.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 14th, 2011.