Jittery lawmakers appear to have missed the bus

One was surprised to find a record number of members sitting on treasury benches in the national assembly Wednesday evening. They also helped the government to dispense with legislative business, almost eagerly.

Their efficient conduct looked odd in the context of some remarks that Dr Fehmida Mirza had passed the other day. Presiding the sitting, she had made us believe that Wednesday could be the last working day of the five-year term of this assembly and the dinner she had fixed on the same day generated the feel of a grand farewell event about it.

The business-as-usual appearances made me think.

When approached, a minister casually claimed that the government needed to pass some anti-terrorism laws in haste. It also desired that before going home, the legislators must also do something to protect school-going children from corporal punishment.

The cynically suspicious mind of a reporter was not willing to buy his story and soon I could discover that the government was hesitating in winding up the assembly to keep itself ready to address some “emergencies”.

To restore Balochistan Assembly, with or without Raisani being the Chief Minister, was yet an unresolved question. Far more important, however, is the pressure that a big group of MNAs, both from the ruling and the opposition parties, was collectively mounting on the government.

The Election Commission had massively revamped nomination papers that candidates need to fill before participating in the next election.

Through the changes inserted in the new forms, the EC seemed adamantly determined to collect the kind of information that tax collectors need for their data banks in other countries. There also are provisions, which could help sorting out persons alleged to have been contesting the previous two elections with “fake degrees.”

Cutting across the party divide, the hardened players of electoral battles have seriously started feeling that supping up to negative stories regarding politicians, drummed by a certain section of media, the Election Commission was setting itself to disqualify a record number of people from contesting the next election. They can perhaps swallow the fear of being kept out of the fray, but far more disturbing remain the possibilities that you can be prosecuted on various counts, thanks to the information collected through the newly introduced nomination papers.

The Election Commission did not care addressing politicians’ concerns in this regard. It rather made them every more jittery by ordering the printing of new nomination papers without waiting for the presidential approval. The Supreme Court seems fully backing the autonomous conduct of the Election Commission and most media persons feel jubilant over the panicky behaviour of the “corrupt tax evaders who keep returning to elected houses with fake degrees.” The government is thus keeping the national assembly intact in sheer desperation to furnish some SOS legislative checks on cleansing binge of the Election Commission. To my humble mind, though, the politicians had missed the bus and certainly reached a take-it-or-leave it dead-end. With enthusiastic support of the Supreme Court and media, the Election Commission will get away with whatever it decides for conducting forthcoming polls.

Dr Ishrat Hussein surfaced as the latest favourite if one could trust whispers in the parliamentary lobbies anxiously searching the name of the caretaker prime minister to be. I was more interested to find out who was ditching which party to switch sides before going to the polls. Captain (retd) Safdar, the discreet son-in-law of Nawaz Sharif, deserves active monitoring in this regard. Tuesday, he had held a luncheon meeting with three leading stars of the PPP from Central Punjab. I will not name names to avoid embarrassing them. One of these three names did shock me, though.

But my flies on the wall told me that the PML-N desperately needs to own some candidates, mostly considered as if put on the hit list of the defunct Laskar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Since the mass scale burning of Christian homes in Badami Bagh Lahore, anti-Nawaz forces have started feverishly building the story that Sharifs “protect and pamper” the LeJ to ensure winning of some assembly seats in Punjab. By adopting some of “known targets of the LeJ” as its candidates, the PML-N wants to negate the same allegation.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 14^th, 2013.