Nisar’s efforts to block DHA bill bearing fruit at last

Both the speaker and the deputy speaker have gone abroad; so are a truckload of opposition legislators. The MQM benches were also empty; perhaps its members had gone to Karachi for attending yet another meeting of their Rabita Committee.

Still, the government preferred to continue the charade of a sitting on Monday. To complete the farce Nadim Afzal Chan was given the chair. He disposed of the full question hour in a record 30 minutes, as most of those who put the questions were absent. Then he dispensed with calling-attention notices mostly about trivial matters.

After watching the lacklustre proceedings Monday, one is forced to wonder about why the mass of our luckless people should wail, if “someone” did actually walk in and packed up this house of our non-serious representatives.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has been resisting passage of a bill that proposes to sanction ‘outsourcing,’ to a famous real estate tycoon of Rawalpindi, the acquiring of land and its development etc for a Defence Housing Authority scheme. He has so far failed to get the proposed bill scrapped but thanks to the noises he made last Thursday, I am told, some people from Rawalpindi woke up and now the Rajput from Chakri is being discreetly approached for a detailed briefing on the alleged scandal.

The welcome discretion that Dr Fehmida Mirza has been maintaining since her husband’s political outbursts in public was commendable, but things are said to be getting serious.

President Asif Ali Zardari, it is said, might find it extremely difficult to accede to Dr Zulfikar Mirza’s demand that the PPP allot party ticket for the seat he has vacated to his barrister son, Husnain.

The anti-Zulfikar lobby in the presidency keeps expressing fears that by owning Husnain as its candidate, the PPP would only confirm the widely popular gossip that refuses to believe that Zulfikar Mirza came out into the open with a bang, without the conspiratorial nod from the President. While denying a ticket to Husnain, on the other hand, the PPP will appear disowning not only Zulfikar but his family and cause Dr Fehmida Mirza to come under deep emotional pressure.

My sources insist that Khurshid Shah who had a long-drawn brainstorming session with the President on Friday had succeeded in making the latter realise that ‘social boycott’ of Zulfikar Mirza would not be politically prudent. He should rather be encouraged to continue wining and dining with youthful members of the Sindh Assembly that he had cultivated during his stint as the Sindh Home Minister. “The social circuit” of Mirza should rather be employed to make him understand that his constant bickering on live television would eventually make things very difficult for the PPP. After getting a green signal from the President, Khurshid Shah met Zulfikar Mirza following which, ‘positive signals’ were sent to Islamabad, although Mirza told Khurshid Shah that he would never stop criticising Rehman Malik, the person he dubbed the ultimate villain.

But now it appears that his demand for a ticket for his son apparently is not helping the matter, however.

Agha Siraj Durrani, once a bosom buddy of Zulfikar, has been reportedly summoned to Islamabad to have a meeting with the President. But the question of him being considered as a replacement of Qaim Ali Shah is still in the realm of uncertainty because lately it is Nisar Khoro the Sindh Assembly Speaker who is taking on the Mirza from Badin. So people ask do we now start watching Khoro rather than Durrani?

Published in The Express Tribune, October 18^th, 2011.