Hina waits for date to take oath as foreign minister

Hina Rabbani Khar, long tipped to be elevated as foreign minister, is now awaiting a date to take oath.

“President’s secretariat is working to find a slot in the president’s schedule for the oath-taking ceremony,” an official at the Presidency said on Monday after reports that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, before his departure to the UK, had advised President Asif Ali Zardari to make her the foreign minister.

Mr Gilani met Ms Khar at the Prime Minister’s House prior to leaving for London and discussed her new role.

Mr Zardari is leaving for Afghanistan on Tuesday to offer condolence to President Hamid Karzai on his brother’s assassination. According to his itinerary, the president will be out of the country on Wednesday and Thursday.

Ms Khar will then be leaving for Indonesia to attend a meeting of the Asean Regional Forum scheduled for July 22-23 in Bali.

The most likely dates for her oath taking will be between July 24 and 26 before she leaves for Delhi for a ministerial meeting on July 27. But Foreign Office strategists are urging the Presidency for an earlier date to avoid an impression that Ms Khar was elevated only to remove the protocol hitch for the upcoming meeting with Indian Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna. With her goal of becoming the youngest and first woman foreign minister in sight, Ms Khar, known at the Foreign Office to be “too protocol conscious”, has got her name and picture as minister of state removed from the ministry’s website before the elevation officially materialises. The office of the foreign minister has been lying vacant since Feb 9 when Shah Mehmood Qureshi lost the ministry in a cabinet reshuffle.

While Mr Qureshi is widely believed to have lost the office for taking a hard line on the issue of immunity for CIA operative Raymond Davis, incidentally Ms Khar’s choice as the next foreign minister, according to a minister, was inspired by former US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan (late) Richard Holbrooke’s special liking for the minister, who was then looking after economic affairs as a minister of state and was responsible for coordinating international aid.