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Thursday March 28, 2024

What a mess

By Shahzad Chaudhry
November 10, 2017

The state of Pakistan is in a functional paralysis. Governance is non-existent. The prime minister of the country spends his weekends in London lecturing undergrads in poorly attended seminars on the future of his country. On last count, at least sixteen students were present to listen to the prime minister of Pakistan. He was accompanied by a few senators and advisers to complement what would have been a thorough low-down of a nation in distress. London remains an obsession for Pakistanis and this was an unavoidable freebie.

The chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province and a hub for what determines this nation’s fate, had left a week before – for London, again. The PM had also travelled then to London over the weekend to ostensibly meet up with Nawaz Sharif whose mandate he is conveniently using to piggy-back on for the last few months of this government. There were important parleys when the three biggies of the party in power were together; like convincing the elder Sharif to give up the path of hara-kiri by deliberately picking a fight with the military, driven by his new-found idealism. That he simply refused and sent them packing was covered by the two losers on how well the party knits under the real leader, the elder Sharif.

That put paid to any notions of rationality in PML-N politics for the foreseeable future. Young Maryam, the heir apparent, got going with yet another exclusive media expression of her unadulterated readiness to adorn the throne. Hamza, the younger Sharif’s son was again pushed back into oblivion. Such is the suspense that is currently being written into the Sharifs’ saga of the ‘Game of Thrones’: Lollywood version.

Shahbaz Sharif, after what can be called a dressing-down, going by the tradition in the Sharif family and pretty cut up about it, resorted to what younger brothers do – sulk. As the elder Sharif ventured back to take the party back in control in Pakistan, SS decided to wait out NS’ presence in Pakistan. Even the return of SS back to Pakistan could not put this humpty-dumpty of a party together again. When the younger Sharif reached Lahore, the elder moved on to Islamabad; from where he is likely to fly out to London without having met the younger Sharif.

PM Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, while lecturing LSE students in London also tended to matters of the state, like convincing the younger Sharif to make up with his country and his job as the CM even though he had been told off by the elder brother a week back, refusing to hand over the party or nominate him as the candidate for the PM in the 2018 elections. The PM may have also informed the CM that while he was away a pall of some heavenly shroud had enveloped his province which now stands closed most of the day and all of the night with all claims of having fulfilled the infrastructure needs of the province and the country evaporating under the heavenly shadow. He is unlikely to have told him that it had gotten to this because of how the city and the province had been run for the last ten years under his watch, dismissing any consideration of the environment.

Our cities have grown far bigger than what we can manage; concrete replacing the green that acted as an oxygen factory. With only clouds of carbon dioxide in the air, both burnt and un-burnt, what enters the airways of both animals and humans is this nucleus around which particulates gather. Disease ensues. Most of Punjab is suffering from it as the CM seeks answers from his lieutenants. The lieutenants can hardly deliver because the winds and the clouds aren’t listening. Instead the coal-based and furnace-oil based power plants so hastily inducted from China and laced all around Punjab will only add to this seasonal odyssey. That it is toxic is obvious, that it is also obnoxious and odious and unsuitable to sustain life is consequential. Soon, it shall grow to the level of being the biggest killer of humans where a society had failed to be seized of its imminence. Clean air, clean water and clean food are now a dream across this blighted country.

The election is round the corner but there is not a soul which knows what is going to happen. Neither the cabinet nor parliament have the time to give to this catastrophe in the making. The 2017 census needs to be clarified but the government neither has the inclination nor the thought to get this irritant out of the way. Both the MQM and the Sindh government – the principal complainants – have thus made the census into a convenient political issue which can easily throw any election into a quandary on perfectly genuine legal grounds.

This then gave currency to an even sillier formulation of an amendment invoking the relevance of the 1998 census for the 2018 election. What was a 140 million population in 1998 is now over 200 million. This is a recipe for an even bigger disaster by any moral or legal standard. The next election thus stands compromised even before it has happened. But so shorn of any sense is this current crop that they sit paralysed in the midst of the gathering storms. There is simply no one to take the helm and steer this ship away from troubled waters. The formal results of the 2017 census will be declared in April following which the formal work on delimitations will begin. This will create an ominous vacuum beyond May 31, 2018 when an interim government will have to bust the constitutional limit of its three months before it can be ready for the elections. This will need constitutional management of which no signs yet exist. The 1998 formula is a deathblow to Pakistan’s future political landscape. 

Instead what you get is a mish-mash of unrealistic desires. The PTI wants an early election, which may be constitutionally right but smacks of ill-intent because of the upcoming March elections in the Senate. Also it is beyond them to force one since it remains the prerogative of the party in power to so order. Similarly, a broader consensus for all parties to agree to dissolving their respective assemblies in the provinces is a prerequisite for the nation to go through with early elections. It may be better to instead work towards ensuring timely elections in 2018 when the tenure of the current government runs out. 

Saudi Arabia is in turmoil, leaving the future of the entire Middle East on tenterhooks. We in Pakistan have our own fiddles to tune. With Iran there has been a fresh breakthrough but who will follow up when we as a nation live from one court appearance to the next. A nation rendered with pervasive instability lies listless before a host of challenges. The required leadership and necessary governance remain desperately absent.

 

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com