Look for a motive even if there are no grounds for it

I felt motivated to find out why Fauzia was brought to Senate for igniting noisy speechmaking in support of Dr Aafia.

Pir Mazharul Haq keeps denying it vehemently but the MQM continues drumming up the story that through a statement, randomly made last weekend, the Sindh minister of education has scrapped the idea of building a university in Hyderabad. Since 1988, the MQM has been savouring a formidable vote bank in that city. It wants its hardcore loyalists to believe that the PPP ‘abandoned’ the idea of building the Jinnah University in Hyderabad to punish the party for quitting the ruling alliance.

For another day, Anis Ahmad of MQM kept hammering home the same point in the National Assembly on Tuesday and made me yawn while sitting in the press gallery. A colleague came to my rescue with the news that things were rather hot and spicy in the Senate.

For more than three years, Fauzia Siddiqui, has been diligently campaigning for the release of her sister, Dr Aafia, by frequently appearing in TV talk shows and leading protest rallies in many cities of the country.

Thanks to her relentless efforts, most of us strongly believe that the US-pleasing government of General Pervez Musharraf had callously handed her sister over to some CIA goons. They implicated her in false cases of terrorism and eventually manoeuvred a judge in New York to send her to jail for a long imprisonment. Back in Pakistan, though, Dr Aafia continues to be perceived as an iconic woman for exposing the ruthless sides of the so-called war on terror waged by ugly and arrogant Americans.

Ms Fauzia was sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the Senate.

Taking full advantage of her presence, senator after senator eagerly took the floor to express sympathy and solidarity with Dr Aafia. In the heat of US-bashing, some of them also blamed the government for not doing enough to help and rescue “Qaum Kee Baitee (daughter of the nation).”

Compulsive reporters are instinctively sceptical and I felt motivated to find out as to why Ms Fauzia was brought to the Senate for igniting noisy speechmaking in support of Dr Aafia, after a long spell of silence on the issue. A reliable source revealed that the PML-Q leader, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussein, had facilitated her coming to the Senate and this forced me to wonder whether a possible swap was being actively considered.

Just think of Dr Shakeel Afridi as a possible swap and then the ‘out of box’ solution that John Kerry had executed to get Raymond Davis released from a jail in Pakistan in 2011. The same Kerry is now heading the State Department in Washington. President Barack Obama is committed to pull out of Afghanistan in 2014 and he needs Pakistan to ensure smooth withdrawal of his troops and their pricey tools for waging a hi-tech war. If successful in staging the swap that I suspect, the PPP and its allies can proudly flaunt Dr Aafia’s possible release during their campaign for the next election. No harm if the Americans in return have Dr Afridi delivered to them. After all, he had decisively helped them to reach Osama bin Laden. No minister that I could talk to was willing to refute my suspicion. They rather heard me with meaningful smirks.

Speaking in the house the interior minister also felt too proud and jubilant on another count. “Within six hours, I made India apologise for vending the nonsensical story that a murdered member of the Sindh Assembly, Manzar Imam, was somehow involved in the recent blasts in Hyderabad (Deccan),” announced Rehman Malik with a puffed up chest. He was still not ready to forgive and forget, though. Ehsanullah Ehsan, the spokesperson of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, has begun frequently phoning The Indian Express to sell his stories. The Indian media, our interior minister demanded in a furious tone, must stop projecting the terrorists based and operating in Pakistan.

Most senators were still not impressed. They kept pressing for holding an ‘in camera’ session to find out how and why Pakistan had presumably “lost” its case against building of the Kishanganga Dam before a court of international arbitration. Farhatullah Babar is just a spokesperson attached to the Presidency. He does not deal with the ministry of water and power.

Still, he took it upon himself to explain that Pakistan had not “lost” the case. Just by surfing the net, he had gathered weighty points to prove his claim. The opposition senators were not interested, though. For them, it was enough that the adviser to the ministry of water and power, Kamal Majidullah, is a bosom buddy of President Asif Zardari and he is alleged to have exclusively dealt with international arbitration of issues related to the Indian Basin Treaty. You can certainly score some patriotic points by wailing over Kishanganga Dam by disregarding hard and complicated facts on this matter.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 27^th, 2013.