Noncontroversial caretaker cabinet: Some hopeful contenders wearing a sullen face

Our special correspondent

Islamabad “ Aspirants roaming about here and there eying positions in the caretaker cabinet have been left with sullen faces with the swearing in of half a dozen federal ministers.

No person with contentious political background, association or leanings has been inducted in the interim cabinet that caretaker Prime Minister Chief Justice (R) Nasirul Mulk has put together after deep deliberations. He is working at a pace of his own choosing.

Some hopefuls have been running around in the hope that they will make it to the caretaker cabinet. They were using their connections to get the cabinet slots. However, in reality, they lost the chance and stood discarded the day Nasirul Mulk was opted for the job for sixty days because he is a different kind of person.

It is a lean, non-controversial cabinet comprising non-political figures, who are respected in their special spheres. No name raises eyebrows because of its background. It is really a makeshift cabinet to work in the transitional phase.

At least three persons taken as ministers were previously relatively unknown and were never talked about for the cabinet induction. The name of Dr Shamshad Akhtar was being often mentioned as a key caretaker since the discussion on the interim setup had started a few weeks back.

Outgoing Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had proposed her name to leader of the opposition Khursheed Shah as the caretaker premier along with Nasirul Mulk and Justice (R) Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, and finally Nasirul Mulk had been unanimously picked by them.

No member of the interim cabinet except Roshan Khursheed Bharucha has ever held a federal or provincial cabinet position. Abdullah Hussain Haroon was the Speaker of the non-party Sindh Assembly in the eighties. Later, he served as Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations. He has mostly stayed away from active, high profile politics.

Dr Shamshad Akhtar was the governor of the State Bank of Pakistan for three years. She has also served in the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations in top positions. She worked as Vice President of the Middle East and North Africa Region of the World Bank. In this role, she spearheaded the World Bank’s response to the Arab Spring as well as the Arab regional integration strategy and its implementation.

Syed Ali Zafar, son of renowned lawyer SM Zafar, is the former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. He is the only man taken in the caretaker cabinet, who has been in the limelight mainly because of his frequent appearances in the TV talk shows and courts in some important cases, attracting public attention. He has been articulating his opinion on debatable political issues and judicial verdicts.

Roshan Khursheed Bharucha worked as Balochistan Minister (2000-2002) for Social Welfare, Informal Education, Human Rights, Youth, Information, Population, Information Technology, Manpower Training, Sports, Archives & Culture and then worked as Senator (2003-2006). It is stated that during the tenure she displayed high level of expertise and experience to develop social strategies.

Azam Khan is former bureaucrat and had served as chief secretary of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). Prof. Muhammad Yusuf Shaikh is a reputed educationist of Sindh.

A unique highlight of the new cabinet is that despite its small size, it has two females. Immediately after assumption of office, Nasirul Mulk has announced that he will have a small cabinet. He has allotted important portfolios like Foreign Affairs, Finance, Interior etc., to different inductees to run day-to-day affairs of the state for another fifty days.

Meanwhile, the unanimous selection of Justice Dost Muhammad Khan, who retired as a judge of the Supreme Court in March, as the caretaker chief minister of KP by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), has come out as a good nomination because of his exceptional track record of as the judge. He was the only justice of the apex court, who declined the traditional reference to mark his retirement for his own reasons.

As the chief justice of the Peshawar High Court, Justice Dost Muhammad Khan had handed down landmark judgments on US drone attacks, missing persons, imposition of life ban on Pervez Musharraf to contest elections, and agreements barring women from casting their votes.

The former judge had been proposed by the opposition in the KP Assembly, the Jamiate Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F).