Does it matter if Raisani spends more time in Islamabad?

Nusrat Javeed.

It took more than 80 minutes of waiting to start another session of the National Assembly Friday and most questions were related to the interior ministry. In the absence of Mr-know-it-all Rehman Malik, a youngish but cool first timer to parliament, Khurram Wattoo, had to speak for him as the parliamentary secretary.

I leave it to you to decide whether Ms Tehmina Daultana of the PML-N was being naïve or deliberately indulged in cheap point scoring. Routine stuff went on being dispensed smoothly, but then we came to some questions on Balochistan and Ms Daultana believed that the ‘mother-of-all-questions’ had come to her mind. Almost epileptically, she started pushing a button on her bench to draw the chair’s attention.

Finally getting the floor after much agitation, she forced Wattoo to clearly tell the house as to how many days a month, Nawab Aslam Raisani spends in Quetta. The astonished parliamentary secretary could only remind her that keeping track of the Chief Minister of Balochistan’s mobility didn’t fall in his ministry’s mandate.

Ms Daultana got very upset with this answer. “Kid, I have been your teacher in school. You must learn how to furnish clear and truthful answers to an elected house,” she sternly told Wattoo and switched her focus to the prime minister, who had walked into the house meantime.

Since Raja Pervaiz Ashraf also doesn’t keep tabs on the movements of Raisani, he preferred to let the question be passed. Ms Daultana wouldn’t give up, though. Standing akimbo, she kept shouting at the chair to get the answer for her. Sitting in the presiding chair, the habitually polite Nawab Yousaf Talpur miserably searched for words to calm her down. The call for Juma prayer rescued him in the end.

The PPP dissident from Quetta, Syed Nasir Shah, was too right to lament over the “recklessly casual behavior that we reflect in this house while discussing Balochistan. Do we seriously believe that accumulated and highly complicated issues related to my province can be resolved by posing trivial questions?”

I am sure Ms Daultana herself knows too well that Raisani mostly lives in Islamabad. Often, he is found lunching at high-end restaurants with a crowd of hangers-on. His evenings are usually spent on some deserted roads of this town that he uses to master maximum speed on a latest model motorbike. Presumably, he does this to “relax his nerves wrecked by the complications of Balochistan.”

Ms Daultana and her leader, Nawaz Sharif also know far better than us mortals as to who really relishes the ‘command and control’ in Balochistan. Our clueless politicians should at least show the courage of admitting their limits, when it comes to the implosive realities of this “strategically important” province. Why waste time in counting the days Raisani spends in Islamabad?

Those who relish command and control in Balochistan have now decided to bring out some ‘truths’ regarding Balochistan in the open anyway.

After almost six years of his death that most in this country believed had happened due to an ‘encounter’ with law enforcers, a usual suspect with a red beret has approached the Supreme Court. The hyperactive court, seemingly too keen to dig out nothing but the whole truth on Balochistan these days, has been requested to form a commission to affirm the claim that instead of being ‘murdered,’ Nawab Bugti committed suicide. Although one needs to keep in mind that before killing himself, he had entrapped five senior officers of the Pak Army to die along with him with deceptive messages of the “decision to surrender.”

It is not a mere coincidence that the lawyer pleading for the operator with a red beret is the same, who executed the idea of facilitating the release of a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis in early 2011. Ms Daultana should rather start cultivating the same lawyer to find more satisfactory answers to her questions on Balochistan and stop feigning a hurt heart in the national assembly.

While recalling the suspenseful drama spun around the arrest and eventual release of Raymond Davis, let me also tell you that our own version of “The Bold and The Beautiful” involving Malik Riaz and Dr Arsalan Iftikhar is yet not over. It is rather almost set to take an interesting turn. Ahmad Khalil discreetly returned to Pakistan early this week. Currently, he is living in a very safe house, somewhere in the G-6 sector of Islamabad. Now don’t ask me: Ahmad Khalil who? Well, he was the man accused to have “entrapped the gullible son” of the Chief Justice to furnish some “blackmailing leverage” for the manipulative doings of the real estate tycoon. Next week will certainly be interesting and we certainly need some entertaining diversions after losing the semifinal against Sri Lanka the other day.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 6^th, 2012.