Nawaz’s Margalla Hills plan a sensational stuff

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has gone to Turkey. Soon after returning from there, he will be re-packing for a weeklong trip to the US and Britain. During his visit, he also expects meetings with President Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

There are some honesty-driven ‘patriots’ with US passports or green cards, however, who intend to embarrass the prime minister from their mother country by launching a full-throttled campaign against one of his crucially placed aides during Nawaz Sharif’s stay in New York. Someone by the last name of Aziz leads the gang and the sinister objective is to get an office vacated that is being expanded to take command and control of multiple affairs related to national security.

Disregarding the game, currently brewing in some powerful drawing rooms of Washington and Houston, I am just not able to find a satisfactory answer to the question: Why summon a house at a time when its presumed leader is not present in Islamabad.

Apparently, this session has been called to complete the ritual of discussing the presidential address that a head of state annually delivers before a joint parliamentary sitting. Asif Ali Zardari has delivered this address, immediately after the May elections. He now has gone home and there simply is no justification to keep discussing an address, which sounds totally disconnected to current political scenario.

Trust the MQM, however. One of its members took full advantage to sell the story as if the ongoing operation in Karachi specifically targets the party that claims to speak for “85 percent” of this city’s residents. He hardly had anything new to hype a sob story, however, which the house and the press gallery ignored with laughable indifference.

The media managers of PTI have been telling us for more than a week that Imran Khan and his party were busy collecting material to put the government on the mat during the forthcoming assembly session. Nawaz Sharif’s dream of expanding Islamabad across Margalla Hills seemed to have furnished sensational stuff for them.

Imran Khan did come to the house and stole attention by holding intense conversations with Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Dr Mazari. Shafqat Mehmud also joined the crowd, once Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan left Imran after some friendly chatting. Yet the party and its leader never made any serious attempt to ignite vigorous discussion on a substantive issue.

It was a perfect day for Imran Khan and his followers in the national assembly to find means to tell us from the floor of an elected house as to how they felt about the prospects of establishing peace with Taliban after targeted murder of a Major General leading troops deployed in Malakand division. With a hurt-heart, the interior minister has held a lengthy presser last week to convince the nation that only after receiving “positive signals” from Taliban, the third Nawaz government called an all-party conference to seek approval to its idea of negotiating peace with them. Almost explicit he also was in suggesting as if a drone strike by ugly Americans literally sabotaged a ‘hopeful development.’ Too direct and specific he sounded in taking on some commentators and media persons for “undermining the efforts for peace.”

Monday was certainly the day when Nisar deserved pushing to a tight corner with solid questions from ‘our representatives.’ So far, we could perhaps buy the story that ‘ugly Americans’ keep demolishing the hopes for peace by throwing missiles in FATA. But immediately after the death of General Niazi, Taliban owned responsibility through their well-known spokesperson and minutes after that issued a long list of their terms for peace. Didn’t these developments clearly indicate that Taliban might want peace, but only on their terms? Should the “only Islamic state with atomic bomb” still be engaging them with reckless appeasing?

Chaudhry Nisar and his party do not appear interested in holding any discussion on such issues of life and death. For the moment, a group of more than 20 persons from the PML-N benches is rather dying to pocket ministerial slots. A PML-N loudmouth from Karachi is telling his journalist friends that he must get the ministry of information to counter the MQM-launched spinning. Marvi Memon feels hurt for being neglected, in spite of “mobilizing hundreds of youth from rural Sindh” and after waiting in wilderness for more than 5 years, Ms Sumera Malik is now ready to grab a high profile ministry. The stories of petty ambitions are in abundance and I do not have patience to narrate all of them.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 17^th, 2013.