PM’s fate
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Aitzaz Ahsan, senior lawyer and PPP politician sidelined into political oblivion by the Pakistan People’s Party for leading the lawyers’ movement in 2007 and for representing the then deposed chief justice at the Supreme Court, appears to have made a comeback. It won’t be a stretch to say many are surprised by how he went from pariah-status to President Zardari’s darling in a matter of weeks. Reports suggest that he is being considered as a possible replacement for Prime Minister Gilani. Though Aitzaz has denied these reports as baseless, such denials are always taken as attempts to hide the smoke of a fire raging somewhere. If one were to believe the speculation and the punditry, Prime Minister Gilani may be considering resigning as part of a move to deflect pressure on the president. In recent weeks, the PPP government has sharply increased its hostility towards both the army and the judiciary. The mouthpiece of this hostility, among others, has been the prime minister who has moved from talking about the possibility of a clash between the army and the government to raising alarm that the bell actually tolls for him and his government. In the midst of this, Aitzaz has become a figure of interest, especially as someone who could lead the interim setup before the elections. Word has it that even the opposition parties – which met Friday with Nawaz Sharif in the chair to try to forge a grand alliance to press for early elections – may have agreed on the choice.
In a politically significant move, the president had invited Aitzaz to make a speech after him in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh on the fourth death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto last month. Recently, he has also nominated Aitzaz as the mentor of his budding son Bilawal. Observers say replacing Gilani may have become inevitable from the point of view of a president who is interested only in his and his government’s survival. Observers also suggest that this move would make sense as the PPP begins to lay down the planks of its electoral campaigns. Aitzaz won hearts and minds during the lawyers’ movement and for a party so inextricably associated with corruption, who better than the clean Aitzaz to lead the election campaign? On the other hand, the rumours of the PM’s replacement may be construed as attempts to destabilise and undermine Gilani. At Friday’s session of the National Assembly, the PM couldn’t even get his own coalition partners and allies to agree on the draft of the government’s ‘pro-democracy’ bill. No doubt the PM has brought ‘stability’ to the system on numerous occasions in the past but he is no longer the non-controversial, consensus-building figure that he may once have been.
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Shahzad report
Despite covering nearly 150 pages, the report by the commission set up to investigate the murder of journalist Saleem Shahzad about six months ago gives little information. Even after interviewing some 41 witnesses, including 13 journalists who appeared before it, browsing through 33,000 emails sent out by the unfortunate Shahzad and conducting other investigations, the five-member commission comprising two judges, two police officers and a journalist was unable to come up with a possible motive for Shahzad’s death or go into the matter of who killed him. The ISI, which denied the charges made against it by the late journalist before he was killed, has not been accused of any involvement. The murder, like so much else in our country, will remain a mystery.
Shahzad is not the only journalist to die in the line of duty. There have been many others, and their number has increased each year with the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists having termed Pakistan the most dangerous country for media professionals. Things have changed remarkably over the last few years. This was certainly not the case some years ago. Just a few days back, the first death anniversary of Wali Khan Babar of Geo News was marked in Karachi and in other places. The young journalist was brutally killed in Karachi last year. Reporters in remote tribal areas where conflict rages are perhaps most at risk. Five journalists in 2011 and eight in 2010 are reported to have died there while doing their job. Media persons play a vital role in bringing information before the public. They need protection so that they can continue to perform this function effectively. Their lives can be saved only if we are able to get to the bottom of cases such as Shahzad’s death. He had left behind warnings sent out to various groups stating he had received threats from certain quarters. Even this has not proved enough to track down how he was killed and why. The failure by the commission to come up with anything that helps us uncover these details places other journalists at still greater risk. Something must be done to ensure they are able to work without the constant threat of death hanging over them and their families.
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The perks
For an impoverished country with an economy in freefall we seem to have a lot of very expensive politicians. Members of the national assembly have been paid benefits – ‘perks’ – worth Rs120 billion over the last four years, with an equal amount being spent on the assembly house and its staff. Looking in more detail at what an individual MNA may scoop up, they have a monthly salary of Rs120,000, topped up by another Rs100,000 per month when the legislature is sitting, and another Rs140,000 for office expenditures. Thus on a good month the average MNA will be trousering Rs360,000. Nice work if you can get it as the saying goes.
But the perking does not stop there. Factor in also the Rs48,000 for every visit the poor creatures have to make to Islamabad, the 40 free air tickets, the unlimited free use of the railways (hardly relevant as there are no railways worth having any more), free electricity and telephone and all the mobile call time they want, national and international – and you have a very beefy package indeed. Should they or their relatives ever fall sick they will be treated at government expense, and to add insult to injury it is reported that further perks are in the pipeline. Whilst it would be the height of naïveté to imagine that MNAs should somehow be self-funding and no burden on the state, it would seem reasonable to expect that they were minimally remunerated rather than pampered as they currently are. We are a poor country. Millions live on the edge of starvation. At the very least in these straitened times, our elected representatives might consider a little personal parsimony and publicly forego some of the perks that go with the job and pay a little more of their own way. Because in doing so they might just win back a little of the respect that they mostly lost decades ago.