Opposition leader flies off on a tangent

For another day Faisal Raza Abidi disappointed the seekers of breaking news by not telling the story that he had been promising to reveal in the Senate, “with a bang,” since last Thursday by invoking the privilege to state whatever he considered fit “in public interest.”

To compulsive doubters like me, his suspense-enhancing silence has started suggesting some backdoor management or yet-not-finished negotiations for a deal. His well-wishers continue to claim otherwise. Some of them stay in active contact with him until late in the night everyday and one such journalist believed that perhaps Abidi had opted to defer speaking up, only for the reason that the President was not present in the country. This argument didn’t make any sense to me.

In the National Assembly, one was astonished to witness the eager willingness the ruling party legislators loudly displayed to facilitate quick passage of a bill that Zahid Hamid, a PML-N legislator, had tabled in ‘personal capacity’. The bill denies discretionary quotas to political and bureaucratic high-ups, when it comes to allotting residential plots in housing colonies developed by the government. Soon the real intent of this unusual cooperation came out in the open.

Immediately after the hasty passage of Hamid’s bill, the government was allowed to get one of its own bills passed on a “private members’ day.” Since Tuesday was the last sitting of its session, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan also walked into the National Assembly in the closing moments with the clear intent of grabbing space in the media. After getting the floor he went on speaking nonstop on various issues in a desultory manner.

The opposition leader in the National Assembly is a seasoned parliamentarian. He had also been one of the key ministers of the two Nawaz Sharif governments. A politician of his calibre needs no tutor to realise that leaders of the opposition in elected houses do not speak for mere point scoring. They always take the floor to speak on substantive issues in a focused manner.

After repeatedly insisting that the current National Assembly had reduced itself to producing “consensus resolutions that the government disregards with contempt,” he gradually came to pronounce that some powerful elements within our establishment were trying to use the public fury over the audacious attack on Malala for launching a clean-up operation in North Waziristan.

As a consummate politician, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan could not afford to sound as if not touched by the attack on Malala. He condemned it with appropriate rhetoric and hypocritical wailing before aggressively questioning the “wisdom behind going to North Waziristan in the name of cleaning it up.”

At least five times, he forced us to recall that none other than Rehman Malik had claimed the other day that the government “knew it for a fact that Maulvi Fazlullah had ordered the attack on Malala.”

Chaudhry Nisar also insisted that the interior minister also said that “once the Mullah Radio of Swat is now living in Kabul.” Finally, the opposition leader justified his elaborate reference to the interior minister’s statement by suggesting that if Maulvi Fazlullah was the main culprit why go to North Waziristan in the name of avenging the attack on Malala. In short, by his speech in the National Assembly on Tuesday, the opposition leader dissociated his person and party from “elements pushing for operation clean-up in North Waziristan.” I can only wish that he had also explained clearly whether Pakistan should send F-16s to bomb the presumed safe havens of Maulvi Fazlullah in Afghanistan. Although, he must also know that the government or establishment never claimed that the said Mullah was living in Kabul.

Their spin doctors rather claim that Mullah Radio lives in and operates from Kunar province of Afghanistan.

It’s time that weighty politicians like Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan honestly tell themselves and their constituents that nowhere in the world states seek “consensus” before establishing their writ in areas presumably falling in their “sovereign territories.” The consensus-seeking pretensions on such questions only expose a weak will. There hardly was any “consensus” for enabling the state of Pakistan to release Raymond Davis while “strictly following the Islamic laws of Qisas and Diyat.” Yet, it did the same to evade the obvious pressure from our “friends” in Washington. The unprecedented three-year extension in General Kayani’s tenure had also been granted without seeking “consensus.” There are decisions that pro-active states have to make on their own. The rest are but dilly-dallying words by rulers without any will.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2012.