President laughs off Thursday’s Press Gallery

After getting out, I discovered that none other than President Zardari had been calling me from his personal number.

Disregarding very potent signs and vibes, clearly suggesting that this could be the last session of the National Assembly that came into being following the February 2008 elections that raised hopes for a smoother journey on the road to democracy, our representatives continued with business-as-usual pretensions during the Friday sitting. I was distracted from watching the thick-skinned audacity while sitting in the press gallery as my cell was constantly vibrating. Someone seemed very keen to talk to me and after getting out of the gallery I discovered that none other than President Zardari had been calling me from Dubai from his personal number. I preferred not to return the call.

In this column that appeared on Friday morning we had talked about the ‘game plan’ that forces and elements working overtime to get-Zardari these days were planning to execute. The game is to invoke article 47 of the constitution for removing Zardari from the President’s office, on ‘health grounds.’ President Zardari and his friends must have felt annoyed or upset after reading the said column. As a decent coward, I did not want to rub in the point.

But the President was in no mood to let it go. My cell began vibrating without any pause and I had no choice but to take the call. With a polite ‘hello’, I finally took it. “Who would decide that I am not physically and mentally fit to function as the president?” was the question he put bluntly. When told that a medical board of competent and well-reputed doctors should decide that, he threw another question with sadistic laughter: “Who will constitute that board?” While attempting to overcome my bewilderment, I suggested that the Supreme Court could always be requested to set such a board. That invoked another very loud and long laughter. One had no choice but to switch to politely ask about his health. He got the hint and turned sober to coolly tell me that things were improving fast for him. Then we talked about some common friends and discussed things that must not be shared in print.

The confident tone and tenor of Zardari’s voice will still not stop me from insisting that with or without invoking article 47 of the constitution, the get-Zardari brigade sounds too confident in predicting that come what may “a caretaker set-up would be there somewhere between Jan 15 to 20.” You get multiple and often contradictory versions while trying to find out about how to reach the predicted ‘inevitability.’ Instead of furnishing satisfactory answers to your questions, far more eagerness is shown to find out the name of the person who should head the caretaker set-up.

Let me also add that it is taken for granted that anxiously awaited caretaker government will not work for 90 days only, with the sole focus on holding free and fair elections. The caretaker government to come is expected to rule and pursue long-term measures to turn the economy around, “at least until November 2013.” Yet no one is still willing to explain to me as to how the fiercely independent Supreme Court of Pakistan can condone such clear violation of our constitution. Cutting across the party divide, an overwhelming majority of our legislators rather seems getting ready to adjust to the predicted scenarios.

But a leader of a weighty party in the ruling coalition worriedly told me in private that Asif Ali Zardari was in a very combative mood. He had been regularly meeting with the President in the last week of November and since his going to Dubai has been talking to him, at least twice a day This leader was also present at Aiwan-e-Sadr when Babar Awan rushed in to break the news that the Supreme Court had asked the President, Chief of Army Staff and the DG ISI to submit their positions on ‘memogate,’ after admitting a petition filed by Nawaz Sharif. The President, he revealed, lost his cool after hearing the news. “So they have finally decided that for being a KAMZOOR (weak) Sindhi, I will run away in fear,” he reportedly wondered. My source also reported that the President kept repeating this sentence as if in delirium. While recalling the same remarks, my source kept apprehending that the scene might not smoothly take the shapes many are imagining with a defeatist mindset in Islamabad these days.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2011.