MPs’ collective reputation and global big picture

Watching Mujras has yet not been declared a crime. Otherwise, a famous mohalla of Lahore might have gone deserted.

The morning after a discomforting incident at the District Courts of Islamabad, our representatives stayed focused essentially on two issues throughout the Tuesday sitting: Pakistan’s role in the global big picture and their collective reputation.

At the outset, Zahid Hamid moved a resolution to facilitate formation of a 7-member committee of the house. The next two weeks, this committee would consume time scanning the two DVDs that Jamshed Dasti had discreetly given to the national assembly speaker during a meeting held at his special chambers established on fourth floor of the parliament building for holding VVIP meetings.

The lone-ranger from Muzzafarghar, Dasti, insists that these DVDs clearly establish that many of our representatives have converted their officially provided and furnished residential quarters into “dens of debauchery.” While accepting these DVDs with an open mind, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq never cared to find out as to how Dasti could manage such exhaustive recordings of things practised within appropriately secured four walls.

As a self-proclaimed “voice of the poor”, Dasti was never known for running a production house; nor did he have any experience of serving with any of our snooping outfits. Someone surely did the recording for him, but without being equipped with any legal authority.

Moving on with serious probing of ‘the material’ provided by Dasti, the speaker national assembly has rather set a dangerous precedent. Taking advantage of it, anybody can now decide to covertly record the private affairs of our legislators and seek further investigations of his or her ‘material’ by duly established bodies.

Many of my sources claimed that the Speaker and the rest felt too comfortable in accommodating Dasti for a solid reason: no prominent legislator has been found in multiple scenes recorded on DVDs provided by him. Most characters seen there rather comprised usual lackeys that our representatives habitually protect and patronise as hangers-on. There, however, are glimpses from a ‘MUJRA (dancing event)’. They allegedly hint at the presence of a state minister in this event. Most legislators don’t like this particular minister for his bad-mouthing deliriums. If exposed, he would only face some embarrassment. After all, watching Mujras has yet not been declared a crime by the state. Otherwise, a famous and historical mohalla of Lahore might have gone deserted many years ago.

After taking care of deadly attack on their collective reputation, our representatives switched their energies to deliver lengthy but mostly cliché-ridden speeches on Pakistan’s foreign policy. Ms Shazia Marri of the PPP proved an exception in this respect by aggressively wondering about how a country like Pakistan could look for an active role in global politics, which seemed miserably failing to protect its capital only the other day. The rest of the participants on an exhaustive discussion on foreign affairs remained dead serious and sober, however.

Most of them primarily wanted to find out from Sartaj Aziz whether Pakistan had changed its position on Syria and decided to have second thoughts regarding importing gas from Iran via a pipeline. Prime Minister’s advisor on national security and foreign affairs kept listening to their worried speeches with patience honed by many years of dealing with national and international affairs.

The concluding speech he made preferred to discuss long-term plans of the third Nawaz government. In the same context, he subtly refuted the feeling that the government had abandoned the idea of regulating and controlling the things strategic and diplomatic through a well-articulated National Security Policy that would be executed by a duly established secretariat.

He also spent time to assure us with carefully chosen words that a paradigm shift had occurred in Pakistan’s approach to global and regional affairs under the third Nawaz government. Both India and Afghanistan have now fathomed the presumed shift and were responding to it positively. The same was the case with the USA.

The eloquent Aziz preferred to casually underplay and disregard the concerns our representatives kept drumming regarding our dealings with Syria and Iran. “As an economist,” he is not so convinced by terms of Pak-Iran pipeline agreement, yet the idea has not been abandoned. Pakistan, he reiterated for another time, has not decided to arm the Syria rebels as well. But talking of Syria he also preferred not to remember the operative clauses of the joint communiqué that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had issued after the recent visit of the Saudi Crown Prince to Islamabad.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 5^th, 2014.