Why the APC sounded more like a plea for peaceful polls

Popular perception in Pakistan’s media does see the PML-N as somewhat soft to militant jihadists.

ISLAMABAD:

Federal minister Sheikh Waqas Akram is relatively new to politics, but his family is old and prominent in Jhang. From the very beginning of its rise in the mid-1980s, Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba also considered the Sheikhs of Jhang as main hurdles to their efforts in converting this city into an operational headquarters of anti-Shia militants. Many elders of this family were brutally targeted. Waqas felt unsafe even while living in Lahore as a student of Government College and Punjab Police had deputed guards to shadow him 24/7. He and his close male relatives continue to need an impregnable security shield provided by the state, anywhere in Pakistan.

In the obvious context of clear threats present to Waqas and his family, one was shocked to hear him stating in the National Assembly on Friday that the IG Punjab police had withdrawn his jawans from security squads for the Sheikhs of Jhang. He sounded doubly shocked that the IG took the alleged decision a few days after making a speech on nonstop killings of Hazaras in Quetta. During this speech, passionately delivered in the National Assembly, Waqas had also accused the PML-N for maintaining not so covert and friendly contacts with some patrons of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Almost explicit he was in suggesting on Friday that the Punjab government perhaps felt offended by his comments on the alleged links and withdrew its police cover in anger.

Waqas sounded brave as he kept insisting that he was merely reporting the decision of withdrawing the police security for the record. “I can protect myself, but if something happens to me, the Punjab government should equally be held responsible for it," he stated in a measured tone.

Notwithstanding the brave posturing by Waqas, Shahbaz Sharif instantly needs to correct things. He should at least try hard to negate the feeling that the Punjab police decided to frighten Waqas for saying the same things, which many in the media had also been reporting relentlessly. Facts can always be different, but the popular perception in Pakistan’s media does see the PML-N as somewhat soft, if not friendly, to militant jihadists. By attending the all-party conference that Maulana Fazlur Rehman had organised in Islamabad the other day, Nawaz Sharif rather provided some substance to this perception.

Ostensibly, Maulana had assembled a motley crowd from all shades of our political spectrum to tell the Taliban that most Pakistanis sincerely desire to negotiate for peace with them. So close to the next election, though, politicians assembled at the JUI-F sponsored APC seemed as if begging and beseeching the Taliban to not disrupt the electoral process by the targeted killing of some candidates or sabotaging election rallies with explosions and suicide attacks.

The spokesperson of Taliban has already announced that his people would only engage the government in talks for peace, if Nawaz Sharif, Syed Munawar Hassan and Maulana Fazlur Rehman were willing to act as “guarantors” for “meaningful negotiations.” Now the same trio that the Taliban had named seemed to have conveyed to them that they would feel more empowered and weighty, only after obtaining the public mandate through the coming election. “Let them be held peacefully, therefore,” is the obvious appeal the APC had made to the Taliban on Thursday.

In a country controlled by the civil and military oligarchs, who never stop boasting of being in command of the “only Islamic state with nuclear weapons,” such ‘pleading for mercy’ by all the major stakeholders of the political prize should sound pathetic. Our usual politicians have no option, though. After many decades of being groomed, controlled and regulated by our oligarchs, they can act but short term. For the moment, their sole priority is to go for the next election with some sense of security and only the Taliban appear exclusively capable of providing it. In spite of heading the presumably mass-based and vote-gathering outfits, the politicians assembled at the APC on Thursday are just helpless. They are condemned to keep appeasing and pleasing Taliban for their expedient compulsions.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2013.