With 35-plus members sitting in the house, they rushed through the yawn-inducing question hour before dispensing a calling attention notice on an insignificant matter.
Eventually, the chair started acting too generous in letting anyone speak from each side of the house on a subject of his or her liking in a desultory manner. I was doubly annoyed for another reason, though.
This house is crowded with some legislators who behave as if they are brand ambassadors of human rights causes. Not one of them, at least during my two-hour presence in the press gallery, cared to recall that Syed Iqbal Haider (Groovy) had passed away. Although never a member of a directly elected National Assembly, Groovy had remained one of the most vocal senators in the early 1990s.
In that capacity he also served as the minister of law and justice during the second government of Benazir Bhutto and it was in this role that he proved firm commitment to human rights-related issues.
To elaborate his contribution, I need to explain the context: going back to the first government of Nawaz Sharif during which the PPP had struggled for more than 18 months to empower the National Assembly speaker for summoning an elected member to the house during its proceedings, even if jailed for whatever causes.
After returning to power in 1993, however, the same party started denying this privilege to opposition legislators and kept Sheikh Rashid Ahmad sweating in jails after being condemned by an anti-terrorism court for allegedly possessing a gun of prohibited bore.
Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain had to be the next.
Like these days, the Chaudhry of Gujrat had been a sitting senator those days. As chairman of the upper house, Wasim Sajjad, called for his presence, but the PML-N hating hawks in the government opted to defy the order aggressively. Iqbal Haider refused to join them and personally took the responsibility of bringing Chaudhry Shujaat to Senate proceedings.
Ms Bhutto was then on a visit to Casablanca for attending the OIC summit.
She hit the roof when informed about Groovy’s initiative. As a snoopy reporter, I got the story and filed it. Iqbal Haider did not react with complaints. After Benazir Bhutto’s return to the country, he rather owned and defended his decision bravely during a cabinet meeting and thus forced to resign.
Not for a second until his death, he ever regretted the said decision and Ms Bhutto herself decided to ‘rehabilitate’ him by first appointing him as the attorney general and then a minister for newly established portfolio of human rights.
Until his last moments, Groovy had remained a steadfast and very vocal defender of human rights and vociferously promoted that version of Pakistan that its founder had dreamt. It is pathetic that none of his erstwhile comrades cared acknowledging his contribution.
In the given mood of reckless indifference, I refused to buy the story that some ruling party backbenchers had been trying to peddle in whispers Monday evening. They claimed that during this session of the National Assembly, most of their vocal members would deliver speeches to enable the government to move against those held responsible for stealing the election in the1990.
I have it from highly reliable sources that President Zardari is just not interested in making any move against Aslam Beg and Asad Durrani even after the release of a detailed judgment against their role in buying politicians through dubiously earned money of Younus Habib. He had rather been telling some people he often trusts that the detailed judgment on the Asghar Khan case could turn into Catch-22 for his party.
If the government moves against Nawaz Sharif for taking money from the ISI to contest the election in 1990 via FIA officials, the PML-N can project it as ‘victimisation’ to its rank and file. This can even lead to a situation where the main opposition party that let the PPP government complete its term without flirting with extra-parliamentary forces for toppling it, could even think of boycotting the next election. By staying away from the electoral process, the PML-N may inadvertently help putting up a government of ‘technocrats’ that many in Islamabad continue to talk about. Ironically, instead of the PPP some vocal allies of this government from other parties are building pressure for “doing something against Nawaz in light of the Supreme Court decision.” Both the president and the prime minister are reported to be acting deaf to their suggestions.
Still, you cannot rule out the possibility that some ‘common citizen’ springs up from nowhere and approaches the Supreme Court with a petition demanding “execution of directions issued in the Asghar Khan case.” After all, things moved on the Memogate in the similar manner and Gilani was also sacked thanks to another petition that begged for execution of a decision passed by the Supreme Court.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 13th, 2012.
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