What supremacy?

The Frontier Post
Editorial:

The prime minister was blowing hot and cold in the National Assembly. But what supremacy of the Parliament was he asking its members to uphold? Haven’t lawmakers been caught red-handed in these very times for fake degrees and they have resigned? Haven’t legislators resigned too for fear of being caught? And aren’t court challenges pending against dozens of parliamentarians for fake degrees? So what was he pleading to uphold? The supremacy of cheating, counterfeiting, fraud and felony? And what feathers has he added to his own hat by campaigning for a proven fraudster in an upcoming by-election? Hasn’t he splattered mud on his face all over with this ignominy? Should he have shunned the cheater? Or had he had to ennoble his abominable inerasable ignobility with his presence? And who says that Parliament here is supreme? Isn’t it itself a big deceit, invented and propagated by our self-conceited and self-assuming politicos? Can it be bigger than the Constitution from which it draws its life and its sustenance, as do the other pillars and institutions of the State? Can a son become his own father’s father and a daughter her own mother’s mother? The conceits of human beings certainly cannot be limitless. But do the conceits of the Pakistani politicos have to be only boundless, as is their hypocrisy always and as is their pretentiousness perennially? But who will tell the prime minister that even if constitutionally supreme, the real supremacy can come to Pparliament only from the respect and veneration that it commands in the public estimation? Does this Parliament command that kind of a prized place of glory in our people’s eyes? You must be kidding. More than two years have passed, and not even a single enactment has it legislated for the amelioration of the people’s multiplying hardships. Throughout, it has stayed engrossed undistracted in the elitist causes of the elitist classes hungering unquenchably for power and bickering meanly over the spoils of power. The commoners and the causes of commoners have throughout received just a short shrift from it, reducing into a sheer redundancy and an absolute irrelevancy to the life of the surging rung of the common citizenry. And with their own disinterest, the parliamentarians have made of it a mere superfluity that could be done away with, with no harm coming to the health of the State and with no tear welling up in the eye of the citizenry by and large. For the most part, they keep themselves absent from it, leaving it mired in an intermittent quorum problem. And whenever they turn up, they keep trooping down to the seats of the ministers with piles of applications pertaining to pursuits for their personal advancement and personal enrichment. The proceedings of the Parliament hardly interest them. And whenever and whoever speaks, it is all about politics, no economics, no people’s issues, no public problems, all of which, at best, get just some passing allusions or remarks without ever getting from them some in-depth analysis or exhaustive thought or possible solutions. Indeed, essentially there is hardly a difference between the act of the fascist praetorian generals and of the bloodsucking feudal barons and moneyed upstarts thronging this Parliament and the corridors of executive power. Both are one and the same. Both are the chips of the same block. Only they differ in dress. The praetorians keep the people subdued and emasculated under the tough heels of their heavy boots. The political lords, though they do all their politics in the name of the people, but the people they keep enslaved in their serfdom while thriving all the time on their toils and sweat on the farms and in the factories. And they too treat the commoners even worse than their pet dogs like stray dogs. And yet the cliché-savvy, populist-jargon-loving and patently-self-righteous commentariat would have it believed that the parliamentarians are what they are as the politicians had had not the chance to show their mettle, as if there have been no unobstructed civilian rules ever and as if even these two years or so were on a lease to the political leadership. But then hypocrisy is not the sole monopoly of the political elite as is not pretentiousness and chicanery. It cut across our elitist segments of polity. And it is no surprise if media channels always keep hosting our political elites who then pose as people of unquestionable probity and imbued with wells of love and affection for the common people, particularly the downtrodden, deprived and denied. But they stink, their act stinks, their talk stinks, and the gathering stench has now become just unendurable. The people must now stand up and declare they would have this stench no more. And in the Parliament, they would have no cheater, no fraudster, no counterfeiter, no matter whoever he or she may be. That’s that.