Rana’s overkill in bad taste

ISLAMABAD:

Rana Sanaullah is a loose cannon. And when it is election time, he does not hesitate courting known leaders of deadly sectarian outfits for vote catching. Still, I did not consider him worth the time the two houses of parliament wasted on Wednesday in discussing some of his imprudent remarks; that too at the cost of debate on budgetary proposals.

Rana loves spinning juicy stuff for the media. He, however, went too far with an overkill in bad taste the other day. As he came out of a chaotic Punjab Assembly sitting on Tuesday reporters assigned with live feeding DSNGs of 24/7 networks asked him to respond to some recent remarks by Dr Babar Awan during his last visit to Punjab. Rana went berserk and said in his characteristic gruff voice but with a straight face: “He comes here (Punjab) to conspire against democracy and judiciary. To my mind, he deserves to be killed (wajibul qatl).”

Fairly a good number of civil society activists also felt upset by these remarks. With panicky tweets, they began drumming up the fear that Rana’s remarks may lead to another high-profile murder. After all, the same Rana had been “inciting people against Salman Taseer,” who was eventually killed by one of his security guards. These activists, I am afraid, also went for an overkill of a different kind.

The late governor of Punjab had provoked a peculiar set of loonies, who were just not willing to allow the government to review the blasphemy law that a hypocritical military dictator, Zia, had enforced in this country.

Like Rana, Dr Babar Awan often bends backwards to please these zealots. As the law minister, Awan had blocked on the grounds of legal lacunas a possible presidential pardon to Aasia Bibi, condemned in the name of blasphemy by the Lahore High Court. Even after the tragic murder of Taseer, Babar remained the most vocal voice in the cabinet that opposed the idea of reviewing the blasphemy law. The PM gleefully owned this argument of Babar knowing very well that the latter because of his close proximity with the president hardly cared for him.

The PPP legislators are familiar with the details of the issue that I am discussing. Yet, in both the houses of parliament, speaker after speaker from the treasury benches abused the privilege of speaking through points of order to condemn Rana calling him a serial provocateur of the murder of political opponents. They also wanted to put this ‘on record’ that if God forbid something happened to Awan, Rana should be held responsible for it.

No one in the press gallery was amused by this childish display of point scoring. On Wednesday the press gallery members had a more serious issue on their mind: The failure of the government to establish an independent and credible commission to investigate the gory murder of their youthful colleague Syed Salim Shahzad. Journalists have been demanding with one voice but to no avail so far the establishment of such a commission headed by a Supreme Court judge and not the Chief Justice of Federal Shariat Court as announced by the government. And to press for that we staged a dharna outside parliament on Wednesday.

At around 2PM, when the prime minister was approvingly listening to the finance minister’s concluding remarks on the budget in the Senate the journalists walked out of the press gallery and went to the press gallery of the National Assembly and left it along with NA press gallery members as the prime minister entered the house and gathered in front of parliament for the dharna.

Nawaz Sharif was the sole leader of the national level, who visited the dharna till the filing of this report. The prime minister, reliable sources have claimed, was keen to visit the protest-camp as well. But people manning his security vetoed against it. Some ministers are said to have suggested that the PM first talk to Babar Awan before meeting the journalists. Others are said to have asked the PM to wait till the return of the interior minister, who is accompanying the president to Kazakhstan, before making any appeasing offer to the journalists.



Published in The Express Tribune, June 16th, 2011.