With eruption of explosive scandal, the plot appears thickening

Instead of spinning any feel good stories about the fifth budget that the Zardari-Gilani government had presented, most ruling party legislators continued transmitting ominous messages during the national assembly proceedings Thursday.

By “raucously disrespecting a unanimously elected prime minister,” they kept lamenting, the PML-N was setting ‘dangerous precedents.’ Even if they didn’t “help the wily designs of extra-parliamentary and democracy-hating elements and institutions, the precedents set by them will definitely provoke the future opposition to cripple the next government by staging mutinous scenes in parliament.”

A seasoned parliamentarian with elitist connections from the Seraiki belt, Riaz Peerzada, delivered a passionate speech in the same context. Widely quoting from various books on parliamentary practices, he urged the PML-N to adopt a “gentlemanly code of conduct” for playing the role of ‘positive opposition’ in this assembly. Doing this, he conveniently forgot that minutes before he took the floor, a PPP diehard from Karachi, Qadir Patel, had employed all tricks and jargons of street boys to mock the opposition leader, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who was not present in the house.

The PML-N legislators do not sit on their benches, if the prime minister were not present in the house. It facilitates the government to rush through the budget-passing ropes. Yet, one of its street-hardened hawks from Lahore, Khawaja Saad Rafique, rushed into the house after Peerzada finished his speech. After extracting the permission to speak on a point of order, he sounded too vicious in trying to prove that Peerzada belonged to a category of people that should be dubbed “hypocrisy personified.” After finishing with a clearly personal attack, he left the house in haste and waited for the time the chair called for the lunch break. While Kundi was about to reach that point, Rafique entered the house again with a small group of the PML-N members. For around three minutes they staged the usual slogan-chanting against the ‘convicted prime minister’ before returning to their homes for lunch.

Cutting across the party divide, most legislators remained more eager to find out the latest on the happenings in the Supreme Court. A television set in chambers of a friends- to-all type minister from Central Punjab had attracted a motley crowd of our usual politicians. Only after gate-crashing into the room, I could discover that contrary to public perception, the ruling party legislators were not feeling very happy over the eruption of an explosive scandal that did dent the reputation of the Chief Justice to an extent.

They surely don’t feel good about a hyper-active judiciary of these days. Yet many of them also fear that maligning the person of Justice Iftikhar could also lead to absolute erosion of the Supreme Court’s good image and interventionist authority for correcting many wrongs. The mainstream of ruling party legislators also believes that in spite of the problems that Zardari-Gilani government had with the apex court, the same court also emerged as the most potent ‘check’ on persons with intrusive ambitions from the armed forces.

Two federal ministers, considered more close to Gilani than Zardari, clearly told me in separate meetings that their leaders should not associate so closely with schemes and designs of the real estate tycoon that was being named for ‘entrapping’ the son of the Chief Justice. They always hated his clout and influence on their government and were now planning to convey their feelings to both the president and the prime minister. One of these ministers also claimed, however, that Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan succeeded in scuttling the idea of getting a negative story printed against the Chief Justice in a London-based newspaper, precisely on the day he was to land in the British capital, with “decisive support” of President Zardari.

While feeling visibly irritated and uncomfortable with epic-touching drama that is being staged in the Supreme Court of Pakistan these days, all legislators that I spoke to also sounded as if fatalistically believing that in the end the PPP leadership would prove to be the ultimate loser of the either/or showdown between the Chief Justice and the real estate tycoon. A well-informed person from among them claimed that after managing the withdrawal of the Chief Justice from the bench probing into the allegations against Arslan, the lawyers of the real estate tycoon would now do everything to drag the Chief Justice in the witness box for cross questioning. In return, an equally competent and seasoned lawyer of Arslan is bound to prod his client to tell-all. The plot certainly appears thickening and getting dirtier.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 8^th, 2012.