The govt must not feel complacent, overconfident

Taking advantage of the numerical edge, the opposition parties have compelled the government to hold the ongoing session of the Senate. For another time, however, they failed to push the government to a tight corner by vigorously focusing on the agenda they had set for it.

Ostensibly, the opposition parties enforced the ongoing senate session for loudly telling the world that instead of getting “the corrupt,” through a transparent and judicious-looking process, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has essentially been behaving like a viciously punitive tool of the Imran government.

Its vocal and daring critics are relentlessly being “implicated in false cases.” In spite of keeping them in its dungeons for many months, NAB consistently fails to establish solid cases against them. Little wonder, the superior courts eventually release them on bail with remarks, clearly admonishing the doings of NAB.

The opposition senators also feel extremely uncomfortable with “media trial,” unleashed against persons spending time in NAB custody. They insist that media managers of the Imran government design and execute these reputation-demolishing trials.

With or without agreeing to opposition’s narrative regarding NAB, we can surely recall a plethora of stories furnishing substantive content to it. Mere bickering, however, doesn’t empower the upper house of parliament to summon the NAB chairman and his top aides for standing in the dock to defend their conduct. You require a smartly designed strategy and diligent execution of it to reach the said target. And the opposition senators didn’t look equipped in the given context.

At the outset of the Friday sitting, Dr Shahzad Wasim, the leader of the house, rather delivered a venomous speech to dampen the opposition. Going back to Panama-days of 2016, he went on and on to promote the story that the “corrupt doings” of various opposition leaders were brought into the open by investigative reporters of international repute. 

Imran Khan and his party had not “invented” any scandal involving them. Even when Nawaz Sharif was still the prime minister of Pakistan, the Supreme Court felt compelled to summon him for revealing the actual sources of his phenomenal-looking wealth. He failed to provide satisfactory answers and subsequently got sentenced for grave charges of corruption by the Accountability Courts.

Shahzad kept insisting that NAB remained an “autonomous” anti-corruption body. A duly prepared and enforced law had furnished draconian-looking powers for it. Both the Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League (N) had around a decade to reform the NAB-empowering law and purge clauses, which the opposition now believes violate fundamental rights.

 

“Hardened criminals and money-launderers, crowding the opposition these days,” stressed Wasim Shahzad with utmost contempt, have begun to cry about these clauses, “only after being caught red handed.”

 

Murad Saeed, the youthful minister of communication, also came especially to the house to rub in the same theme. Some ruling party senators kept supporting Shahzad and Saeed with loud and taunting remarks against the opposition. They also attempted to block the flow of opposition senators by ceaseless hackling.

 

Speaking for the Imran government, ministers and ruling party senators also sounded too pleased in pronouncing that even after getting united in an alliance, Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), and holding rallies under its banner in all the major cities of Pakistan, the opposition parties miserably failed to trigger a mass movement against the Imran government. PDM’s “flop rally” in Lahore on Dec 13 rather proved the last nail.

 

Pakistan Peoples’ Party, the ruling party representatives, continued asserting, was clearly developing second thoughts vis-à-vis the PDM.

It is just not willing to resign from the national and provincial assemblies and is bent upon participating in elections for half of the senate seats, scheduled to turn vacant in March this year. In sheer frustration, the opposition senators enforced the ongoing session merely to bad mouth NAB and the Imran government.

 

They also provoked Maulana Ghafoor Haidri and Osman Kakar to focus more on defending their leaders, Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Mehmood Khan Achakzai. Doing this, both of them kept daring the Imran government to arrest them and “face consequences.” Haidri and Kakar also consumed most of their time to laugh at “patronage,” the Imran government allegedly savors from its “selectors.”

 

During the Senate sitting of Friday, both the government and its opponents appeared nauseatingly stuck to the narrative and stories, they had been drumming since 2016. Instead of engaging us by raising fresh points, they induced yawns like a broken record.

 

The Imran government strongly feels that 11-party alliance of its opponents was all set to break, hardly three months after its formation. March 2021 will prove more depressing for them. In that month, Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) would smoothly surface as the largest single party in the upper house of parliament. PDM could not move even an inch to prevent the said possibility. The confusion and distrust amongst its components would rather help the Imran government to complete its five-year term, without much ado.

 

The confidence, Imran government is proudly displaying these days seems realistic, if you go by the appearances only. PDM has certainly failed to put forth a work plan, convincing the usual observers of our political scene that Imran government would crumble before the “street pressure.”

 

From day one of the PDM’s formation, Pakistan Peoples’ Party never seemed obsessively determined to send the government home by walking out of the assemblies. Thanks to its formidable majority in the Sindh Assembly, PPP continues to savor the third term in power in the second most populace province of Pakistan. Instead of enforcing fresh election of the provincial assembly by resigning from their seats, the PPP legislators would rather want to grab more seats in the senate by actively participating in forthcoming elections of half the seats of upper house of parliament.

 

The “moderate majority” within the PML-N, seeking guidance from its “deal making” President, Shehbaz Sharif, would prefer to take the same route in Punjab. Their resignations from the national and provincial assemblies do not ensure early elections by all means. Maulana Fazlur Rehman could yet not convince his newfound allies in the PDM that resignations from the assemblies would lead there.

 

But disregarding the obvious political dynamics, PDM helped the media to build hype about the question of resignations from assemblies, established through the “engineered election” of July 2018. The threat of resignations also suggested as if preventing PTI to achieve its much-coveted desire of mustering workable majority in the Senate. The overhyped story has now fizzled out, facilitating the Imran government to feel good, confident and comfortable about it.

 

Relishing the pleasure of a ‘victor’, however, PTI refuses to realise that even after smoothly passing through the senate elections of March 2021, it would not manage more than 28 seats, in the best of circumstance.

This number will certainly not make it the majority party in the Senate as well. Being the largest single party, it would still need to continue pampering its “allies” for smooth sailings in both the houses of parliament and they have already begun acting hard to get. The government must not feel complacent and overconfident, simply for the real or imagined “withering” of the PDM.