“Our representatives” took around an hour to find out appropriate means and words to express “sorrow and sympathy” for the victims of a massive tremor that hit most of Balochistan Tuesday afternoon. Awaran, comprising six districts, was the main target of high-intensity tremors. Since this is a vast sparsely populated area, it was extremely difficult to correctly assess and report the damage to life and property. We still need more time to collect authentic figures and quantify the loss, though the signs indicate a mass scale calamity.
If members of the national assembly of Pakistan were genuinely perturbed regarding the news of doom and gloom from Balochistan, they could have forced the government to provide initial findings related to the impact of Tuesday earthquake through an imaginatively put motion. The category of ‘adjournment motion’ in the assembly rules rather facilitates any MNA to seek information on “any matter of urgent public interest.” Not a member cared to employ this tool. The House went on dispensing the question hour and only after finishing with it, some member tried to wail over ‘the tragedy in Balochistan’ through points of order.
The chair felt restricted in allowing a cathartic charade, simply for the reason that according to the day’s agenda members were only supposed to deliver speeches on the presidential address that Asif Ali Zardari had delivered before a joint parliamentary sitting before completing his term many weeks ago. The Speaker gently suggested that members could use the opportunity of discussing the presidential address to talk about the recent earthquake in Balochistan as well.
Syed Khurshid Shah, the opposition leader, seriously believed that ‘casual recall of the Tuesday tremors would not be appropriate’. The national assembly should rather express its concern through a properly presented and adopted resolution. Now the question was how to go about it. After much hassle and rules-related hair splitting, Ms Shazia Marri finally read a paper with three lines with chaste Oxbridge accent. ‘The resolution’ put by her was adopted unanimously and the national assembly of Pakistan seemed as if feeling great for expressing “sorrow and sympathy” for victims of the Tuesday jolts in Balochistan.
While the House was groping for means to convey its concern to the earthquake victims, Awais Leghari spoke on a point of order to stir a possibly explosive controversy. Thanks to above average rains and uprising of Mangla Dam, he recalled, we now have ample water to distribute among provinces. IRSA, the water distributing authority, however, did not seem generous to Southern Punjab in this regard. Leghari rather accused it of even violating the terms of Water Accord signed in 1991. He was surely speaking for his immediate constituency, but Ms Marri also expressed her fears of deprivation for her province, Sindh. Both the youthful legislators, I insist, tried to exaggerate in a wanton manner. Water distribution did look too serious a business to be left to their whimsical point scoring.
In the lobbies and the ministerial chambers, curious whispers focused on an entirely different subject, which seemed doubly ominous to me. Before discussing it, one has to report that since the suicide bombing in Peshawar a big group of legislators from both the government and the opposition benches had started to feel as if some influential persons from among the praetorian elite were itching to sort out Taliban by employing all coercive tools of the state. The same group also feels that if ‘an operation is launched before November 2013,’ the prime minister might feel shy to ‘change the commander during the heat of a do or die battle.’ The whispers for ‘an extension’ forced me to comb various sources who have been frequently attending brainstorming sessions that Nawaz Sharif keeps conducting formally or informally on matters of national security for the past so many days. Not one of them was willing to take the whispers for extension seriously. All of them rather dismissed them with contempt and absolute confidence and kept insisting that Nawaz Sharif would go for the ‘senior most’, as he had been promising on record before elected prime minister of Pakistan for the third time.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 26th, 2013.
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Sincerely hope NS has learned lessons from history and would not indulge in favouritism in selection. Let the best man, not necessarily the senior most, be selected for the job.