A pointless pandemonium

There was little noise in the Assembly over the dozens of people killed in Karachi in recent days.

KARACHI: As the shrieking and yelling in the Sindh Assembly reached deafening levels on Thursday afternoon, it was difficult to forget that the ‘members of the august house’ - as they so like to describe themselves - are paid by taxpayers to throw tantrums.

When asked who was responsible for what was a colossal waste of taxpayer money, the Sindh information minister retorted that one should submit a petition in the Supreme Court to ask who should compensate the money wasted. “In a democracy, it is everyone’s right to protest,” he said, probably forgetting to add that it isn’t everyone’s right to be paid to protest in a democracy.

The pandemonium - all over the Sindh Peoples Local Government Act, which has caused more heartache and panic than few pieces of legislation have in recent history - would have probably served more of a purpose if it wasn’t being staged for the benefit of the cameras.

The most heartbroken MPA over the panic, caused by rampaging members of the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional, was Pakistan Peoples Party’s Rafiq Engineer. He had apparently brought his “daughters’ marks sheet to give to Pir Mazharul Haq for admission to a school” and PML-F MPA Nusrat Seher Abbasi tore it up in a fit of passion.

The outrage, the PPP MPA informed us, was over the valuable documents being destroyed, not really over the fact that he was lobbying a colleague in the provincial cabinet.

But onwards we go. The noise in the Assembly was little over the dozens of people who have been killed in Karachi in recent days. The mumbling and bumbling chief minister made one of the more convoluted cases for law enforcement that has ever been heard, wringing his hands and saying, “The way this issue has been splashed… it shouldn’t have in this way.” Clearly, all is well in Sindh, the daily crime rate be damned.

Boy wonder

The problems and panic of Thursday will fade away. This isn’t the first time the assembly has been in a full-fledge state of rebellious uproar and it won’t be the last - as long as PML-F MPA Nusrat Seher Abbasi still has her lungs.

The Pakistan Peoples Party has other things to worry about. With only a few months to go, it has been struck with the election fever and ‘chairman sahib’ - the young Pakistan Peoples Party head Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari - is apparently in listening mode. On Wednesday, he met with MPAs from Sindh to get a progress report of what they’ve been doing in their constituencies.

“He mostly listened and took notice of a few issues that were brought up,” said MPA Tauqeer Fatima Bhutto, who is the Sindh minister for women development. Among the issues discussed, she said, was the representation of women in the assemblies.

Apparently Bilawal, like his late mother, wants to see an increase in the number of women elected to parliament. PPP Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has reportedly also asked female MPAs to pool together their development funds, divvy them up and spend them in areas where there is no representation of the PPP on general seats.

And for all of Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari’s public concern for the state of minorities in Pakistan, he apparently had little to say when MPA Mukesh Kumar Chawla gave a “satisfactory report” and said that the Hindu community was happy and there was no major issue. The daily stories of kidnappings, forced conversions for marriages and conversions for ‘acceptance in society’ be damned as well.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 16^th, 2012.