Is the president doubling as a super-duper foreign minister?

In spite of making non-stop phone calls and using all possible channels of backdoor diplomacy, Senator Raza Rabbani could not yet persuade the opposition nominees to come back to the meetings that Parliamentary Committee on National Security is holding these days to produce ‘consensus-based guidelines’ for revisiting Pakistan-US relations.

Still, the joint parliamentary sitting continues with trivial speechmaking and point scoring. Little wonder, President Zardari felt frustrated and had summoned leaders of all his coalition partners to hold a brainstorming session with him late Tuesday evening.

He and Gilani now seem ready to go ahead with adoption of whatever the PCNS will present as the final draft, even after no-show by the opposition parties.

Raza Rabbani continues to resist, however. He strongly hopes that by Thursday morning, Senator Ishaq Dar of the PML-N may join him to prepare a consensus-looking package of proposals by the PCNS. Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the JUI is still resisting and even an exclusive call on him by the US Ambassador Tuesday failed to extract any flexibility from him.

Most in the Press Gallery were not interested in the proceedings of the joint parliamentary sittings anyway. Far more excited they were to get a hot speculation confirmed or rejected. Ironically, none other than Prime Minister Gilani was exclusively responsible for igniting and fuelling the said speculation.

While talking to a group of journalists in Lahore on Sunday, he vaguely suggested that a ‘new team’ of interlocutors might now be asked to negotiate establishment of the lasting peace with India.

After reading the said story with a catchy headline by a contemporary, the lethargic mind of mine presumed that Gilani was perhaps hinting at selection of a special emissary who would be talking to Indians like Tariq Aziz had been doing during the days of Gen Musharraf.

Most journalists were, however, told otherwise by their unnamed ‘sources’ from the Foreign Office. We were given to believe that President Zardari was now getting disappointed by Ms Rabbani Khar.

He thought that she was a ‘political lightweight’ and had often been forwarding and pleading for the ‘institutional advice’ that our diplomat-babus churn while sticking to a rigid mindset.

Zardari had surely sought advice of the Foreign Office, when the Indian Prime Minister conveyed the desire of hosting a lunch for him at his Delhi residence before the President proceeded to Ajmer. The summary that the FO presented to him lacked clarity. It sounded neither-here-nor-there to a street smart Zardari, who always prefers to hear things in black and white from aides.

Some Foreign Office sources also whispered to their favourite journalists that Zardari also believed as if people operating from the former Hotel Shehrezade building were not very excited with his idea of going to India, even for a private/spiritual visit and he also suspected that instead of confronting the ‘institutional rigidity’ like a forward-looking politician, Hina Rabbani Khar had increasingly been succumbing to it: perhaps another Shah Mehmood Qureshi in the making!

One Indian newspaper went a step further. Through a story printed on Tuesday it claimed that Ms Khar earned the ire of President Zardari, not by taking a presumably ambiguous position regarding his visit to India.

Things turned far more complicated for her during a call on that a senior American emissary had made on the President late last week. During the said meeting the emissary was reported to have expressed the desire that Pakistan must send a high-level person to attend the summit that President Obama would host in Chicago next month to ponder over the Aghanistan-triggered quagmire.

President gleefully promised to consider the invitation for this summit seriously, but Ms Khar reportedly intervened, somewhat bluntly, to remind him that only after completion of the review of our relations with the US by its parliament, Pakistan could feel ready to consider the proposed invitation. The US emissary felt surprised by her cutting remarks and shared the impact of it by using a slang that I can’t reproduce in this family newspaper.

Don’t blame me, therefore, if I continued stalking the foreign minister like a paparazzi during her presence at Parliament building Tuesday. Finally, I could succeed in stealing her attention while she was about to move in the elevator for leaving.

She was polite in inviting me to a cup of tea at her chambers and after reaching there continued smiling at hot speculation about her possible removal. She stood up the minute I finished my cup of tea and while leaving just said that whatever was reported about her stance on relations to India and about the question of Pakistan attending the Chicago Summit was “not correct.”

Published in The Express Tribune, April 11^th, 2012.