When Deputy Speaker Shehla Raza finally materialised to take her chair at five minutes to noon, over two hours after the Sindh Assembly session was scheduled to start on Friday, it almost seemed as if she had been magically summoned out of thin air.
Earlier, the MPAs had glided out of their gleaming Pajeros and ascended to the grand assembly building. But beneath the pomp and circumstance there was very little substance in the House of elected representatives yesterday.
Reporters gossiped over the fate of Sharjeel Inam Memon, who may be losing his position as information minister soon. These days the biggest threat to any minister’s job is any link with Zulfiqar Mirza. Yet the pro-Mirza legislators didn’t mingle much with their Pakistan Peoples Party colleagues.
Mirza - like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series - wasn’t at the Sindh Assembly but his Dark Mark loomed in the hall. His replacement - the bumbling, perpetually smiling Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Wassan - may lack in fiery spirit but not in usefulness. Wassan’s arrival prompted a flurry from the benches as MPA after MPA walked up to the front row bearing papers that needed his signature, or with requests. He was constantly harangued until he actually stepped into his car to leave later on.
Wassan and Agha Siraj Durrani soon disappeared from the assembly to negotiate with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) legislators over the wording of a resolution condemning those who engaged in critiques of President Asif Ali Zardari and MQM chief Altaf Hussain.
Waiting MPAs grew impatient. Several of them who were lucky enough to find a working signal managed to occupy themselves with their cell phones. This did not include Arif Mustafa Jatoi who first asked Sindh Assembly secretary Hadi Bux Buriro if the session would ever start. He then proceeded to stalk back to his seat before ripping up the day’s agenda into precise pieces. Perhaps a more dramatic outburst might have forced the MQM and PPP to hurry up, but one can only hope that there is a stronger protest lodged by more MPAs the next time the day’s business is delayed.
Mercifully, the negotiations ended at around noon and Durrani and Wassan returned - followed by the MQM’s contingent of MPAs - and the day’s proceedings began with a never-ending series of requests for fateha and many a clichéd statement about the late Nusrat Bhutto.
In the end, the house adopted MQM MPA Heer Soho’s resolution against people who have used “unethical” and “provocative” language against Zardari and Hussain. It was passed without anyone naming any names. And thus, while he may not have been physically present among the magicians of the Sindh Assembly, the former home minister who cannot be named proved that sometimes you say it best when you say nothing at all.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 19th, 2011.
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