Dasti sits miserably alone as Nisar pokes holes in his slanderous story

The self-righteous arrogance of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan is difficult to cope with. Yet one cannot disregard his credentials of a hardened player of games that the so-called deep state and a government of elected civilians keep playing to protect their turfs. He instinctively realized that the story Jamshed Dasti had zealously peddled while speaking in the house Thursday indeed provided lethal stuff for the media and eventually damaged the collective reputation of our public representatives.

For the likes of Nisar, the defamatory content of the story told by Dasti sounded doubly intriguing for its timing. After all, from the coming Monday the national assembly is set to start discussing the National Security Policy. The third Nawaz government proudly projects this policy as the first-ever attempt to bring things strategic and security related under complete control of the elected civilians. By vending a slanderous story about our representatives, Dasti has forced people to wonder whether “people addicted to alcohol, hashish and dancing girls” have any will or the capacity to even discuss serious issues, forget asserting control over them.

The lone-ranger from Muzzaffargarh, Dasti keeps insisting that he also has a video to establish the veracity of allegations hawked by him. But this self-declared “voice of the poor” does not know how to operate even an ordinary cell phone. His lackeys take calls for him and he mostly calls you back from landlines. He certainly has no capacity to record things “improper” by using state-of-the-art gadgets. Someone from among the snoopy outfits of our intrusive state must have provided him ‘the stuff.’ He will be forced to name names, if getting serious about waging a moral crusade. No wonder, Dasti appeared visibly pale and upset, when Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was busy in refuting the story told by him.

The interior minister revealed that since Thursday night he remained assiduously busy in cross-checking the piles of visuals recorded through more than two-dozen of CCTVs installed at all the exit and entry points of parliamentary lodges. Each visitor to any parliamentary lodge has to provide his or her Computerized National Identity Card (CNIS) before being allowed entry. The details provided by visitors are duly recorded in a logbook. Chaudhry Nisar claimed to have done a thorough recheck of this book and then summoned senior officers of the Special Branch for intense questioning as well. After spending long hours in checks and double checks, Nisar failed to find even a shred of evidence that could somehow corroborate the story told by Dasti.

Legislators from all sides of the house kept cheering the interior minister with repeated and hearty desk thumping and Dasti looked miserably alone throughout the sitting.

To me, however, the damage caused by Dasti would not be over, even after a forceful denial by the interior minister. Instead of gaining anything from the scandal he had stirred, Dasti may rather find himself in deep trouble in the end. The degree, he claims to have acquired from a ‘Madrassah,’ lest you forget, has yet not been declared ‘valid’ by the forums concerned. He is sitting in the national assembly, primarily due to the interim order that he got in his favour to contest for two national assembly seats on May 11, 2013. Dasti remains vulnerable, in short.

Even without Dasti’s coming out into the open, however, it now has become almost obvious that a peculiar gang of civil and military oligarchs is not feeling too comfortable with elected politicians’ “intrusions into their turf.” In the same context, Raza Rabbani also behaved furious in the Senate. With solid support of 31 senators, he rather forced the Chairman Senate to admit a privilege motion against the official spokesperson of our Foreign Office.

Reacting to stories that continue claiming that Pakistan has changed its stance on Syria, the spokesperson had passed certain remarks during a weekly briefing. The studious Raza took serious exception to some of her remarks and sounded perfectly justified in doing so. He kept reminding the chair that much before the media, the opposition senators took the lead to notice and criticize Pakistan’s “policy shift” on Syria. “But the spokesperson,” Rabbani recalled aggressively, “showed the audacity to declare that people spinning the negative but imaginary stories regarding Pakistan’s official stance on Syria were either motivated (obviously by unpatriotic forces) or do not have any capacity to fathom the delicate nuances of foreign affairs.” Only the foreign office knows what serves the national interest.”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 1^st, 2014.