The BackBencher: Saturday night fever in the Sindh Assembly

The discussion was on labour issues but beedi and alcohol took up a fair bit of time on Saturday.


Saba Imtiaz February 18, 2012

KARACHI:


Sindh’s taxpayers, would you like to know where your money went on Saturday? Here’s a hint: the provincial assembly, where lawmakers asked questions as meaningful and relevant as: “What is the difference between a cigarette and a beedi?”


I wouldn’t blame the questioner for her lack of knowledge. If you Google ‘beedi’, the second, third, fourth and fifth link is for the song “Beedi” from the Indian film Omkara.

The discussion was on labour issues but beedi and alcohol took up a fair bit of time on Saturday. It may have been noon but what else is one supposed to think of on a weekend? Speaker Nisar Khuhro gravely intoned that the discussion was happening because of the risks involved with tobacco: Newsflash – “smoking is injurious to health.”

Many an MPA hemmed and hawwed about the notion of beedis, the problems beedi workers face while others struggled to merely pronounce the word. “Baydi?” asked one. Khuhro corrected her: “Bee-di… cigarette beedi!” and mimed puffing on a cigarette. Others offered up new information – apparently beedi leaves are no longer imported in Pakistan so they must be smuggled into the country. Another had a question – why should the labour department register workers who work on an ‘illegal’ trade?

For what it’s worth, the tobacco plant was introduced in the region by the Portuguese in 1605, according to the Imperial Gazetteer of India.

The mention of alcohol inspired MQM MPA and provincial minister Rauf Siddiqui to recite a couplet about alcohol, received with many calls of ‘wah wah’ from his colleagues.

Sadly, the day did not turn into a full-fledged poetry recital or a discussion on the merits and demerits of alcohol. That, at least, would have been far more entertaining than the speculation in the press gallery on why Interior Minister Rehman Malik was a no-show at the assembly on Saturday.

The actual agenda – with some rather interesting questions that had been posed to the labour department – would have made for a fairly engaging discussion. MPAs busied themselves with self-explanatory questions such as “What are the contents of so-and-so ordinance” and “Are these answers about Sindh or Karachi?” By the end of the Q&A hour, speaker Khuhro and Labour Minister Ameer Nawab appeared to have tired of saying the words “irrelevant” and “As I have been saying...” And they all lived happily ever after, as the session wrapped up and Khuhro announced they would next meet on Tuesday, thus avoiding a pesky case of the Monday blues.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 19th, 2012.

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