A lie-low type’s unusual anger at critics of economy’s handling

Ishaq Dar is certainly polite but he took on his critics with unusual anger.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan appeared to have viciously worked overtime to show it to the world that Nawaz Sharif government could carry on with legislative business without much ado, even if two mainstream opposition parties decided to boycott national assembly proceedings. An unprecedented number was certainly present on the PML-N benches when the house met on Thursday morning.

To ensure sustaining the number-strong presence, the interior minister astonished many in the press gallery by walking up to each member of his party throughout the sitting. Betraying his reputation of being an arrogant recluse, he was rather seen sharing jokes and ego-massaging banter with them.

In spite of collecting a formidable number for the ruling benches, the interior minister did not want to convey the feeling as if the PML-N conducted its business without any member sitting on the opposition benches. Taking full advantage of ‘the leverage’ that he savours vis-à-vis the MQM in view of the ongoing operation cleanup in Karachi, he also managed to bring many legislators of this party to the house.

Collecting a respectable number did not remain the sole objective. To keep things ‘interesting and newsy’, the government also launched its finance minister to deliver a highly focused and engaging speech.

Ishaq Dar is certainly polite and lie-low type. But defending his policies through an exhaustive speech Thursday, the finance minister took on his critics with unusual anger. At times, he even sounded contemptuous to deride the credibility of his critics. The operative part of his speech kept rubbing the point that things were no more dismal regarding Pakistan’s economy. There is a peculiar set of ‘pseudo-intellectuals,’ however, who keep spinning the stories of gloom and doom by writing regular columns ‘on economy’ for some newspapers.

Successive finance ministers of Pakistan, Dar went on, had developed the practice of pampering these ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ by formal and informal induction of them in the process of financial management of this country. Since he did not feel any need for their ‘wisdom’, such intellectuals eventually turned against him and began writing bleak stories about the state of Pakistan’s economy under Dar’s command.

Without clearly naming him, Dar was also too obvious to place Asad Umer in the category of “pseudo intellectuals regularly telling lies about Pakistan’s economy on TV screens.” Sheikh Rashid Ahmad is another opposition member frequently seen on 24/7 channels in lynching financial management of Ishaq Dar. The finance minister, however, preferred not to respond to “ill-informed babbles by a self-made head of the one-man political party.” The finance minister was essentially hurt with the conduct of some TV anchorpersons, who he believed never cared to confront lies told by some opposition members in their talk shows with ‘facts.’

Dar sounded too confident in claiming that most of his critics were not only dishonest with their facts but incurably lazy as well. “They do not even bother to carefully consider data” that his ministry regularly updated on its website.

To prove his point, he furiously rejected the widespread feeling that the Nawaz government paid the huge amount of circular debt to power producers by simply ‘printing notes.’ Very proud he appeared in flaunting an official document, which to him ‘clearly established’ that the finance ministry had only borrowed a relatively smaller amount from “federal consolidated fund (read note-printing)” for paying the accumulated amount of around 5 billion Pak rupees in one-go. Most of the money for paying the circular debt had been collected through diligent fiscal management.

Thanks to this “imaginative” clearing of the accumulated debt, Dar believed, more electricity came into the system, which in the end helped the growth rate to jump from 2.5 to 6 per cent in first three months of the current financial year.

I do not have any capacity to counter the tale told so proudly by Ishaq Dar in the national assembly Thursday for being an economic illiterate. People like me, certainly required the self-declared spokesperson of the poor and marginalized to counter his speech. Thursday could also have been the day for Asad Umer to prove his edge when it came to discussing economic and fiscal management by Ishaq Dar. Both of them were not present in the house and so was the PPP’s financial wizard, Syed Naveed Qamar. Thanks to their absence, Ishaq Dar did succeed in getting away with a hard and almost convincing selling of a rosy story.

It certainly is time for the PPP and the PTI leaders to rethink their policy of boycotting the national assembly proceedings on a trivial and laughable point that they appear recklessly sticking to for the use of word ‘TAMASHA” by Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 20^th, 2013.